Beginning this month, Michigan Medicine will launch a speech recognition technology called Fluency Direct. Michigan Medicine is retiring Dragon services effective Feb. 3 and Phone Transcription services effective Feb. 15.
“Michigan Medicine has seen a steady decline in phone transcription users, but still incurs substantial per-line transcription costs and fixed vendor costs,” said Jeff Terrell, M.D., professor of otolaryngology. “As part of the economic recovery plan, and part of the Michigan Medicine plan to improve clinical documentation and coding, 3M M*modal was chosen as a vendor with a suite of applications to help clinicians with documentation. Fluency Direct will be the first application implemented.”
Fluency Direct provides an improved user experience and supports more documentation needs. This transition from Dragon allows clinicians to use speech recognition to perform immediate documentation within MiChart as well as speech tools to navigate, search and perform many manual workflows in MiChart.
This transition will enable some significant enhancements, including:
- Utilize any cell phone/digital device to dictate through a mobile application into MiChart Hyperspace or directly into Haiku/Canto.
- Dictate an entire note via Fluency voice to text and watch it populate the documentation section.
- Improved accuracy of the new cloud-based products.
- No risk for corruption or loss of individual profiles because everything lives in the cloud.
- No more waiting for transcriptions to come back and having to read them after the fact.
- Voice commands to navigate, order, paste lab results or smart links, chart search and perform many manual workflows.
To prepare, required training will occur in phases over several weeks in January and early February. There will be an online training course with multiple date/time options available.
Phase One of the implementation is to train current/active Dragon and Phone Transcription users. Users will be contacted individually via an email to sign up for an online training course but can also sign up using this link — Fluency Direct Sign Up — to attend one of the sessions.
Providers who are not current/active Dragon or Phone Transcription users will have an opportunity to sign up for an online training course in early February.
“The goal is to make our clinicians as a group more efficient and effective in documenting care and navigating clinical workflows in MiChart. Within a short period of usage and practice using the software, they will be able to complete documentation and potentially sign documentation in one step, without delay, ” said Terrell.
Please look to the Fluency Direct project page for updates, training resources and access to the sign up link.