Singing River helps clinicians streamline workflows with Dragon

Singing River Health System provides high-quality care for people throughout the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Comprised of three hospitals, primary care clinics, community medical parks, and specialty centers, Singing River is a community owned, not-for-profit health system and one of the area’s largest employers. Singing River consistently looks for cost-effective ways to help its clinicians work more efficiently and allow them to focus on what matters most—their patients.

Dr. Clinton Hull, Medical Director of Clinical Informatics at Singing River wanted to upgrade its legacy installation of speech recognition to Dragon Medical One, a more modern, cloud-based clinical documentation companion.

The health system recognized that moving to the cloud would give clinicians easy access to the most advanced functionality while helping to streamline IT management. For example, a cloud-based solution would enable Singing River’s IT team to push updates to the entire network and remove many of the installation and management headaches associated with an on-premises application. But even more importantly, the switch to Dragon Medical One would open the door to a new world of productivity for the organization’s clinicians.

“One of the things that’s helped providers, including myself, become more efficient and save even more time with Dragon Medical One are the shortcuts that do repetitive actions a lot faster than finding and clicking on things or typing in long paragraphs of text,” said Dr. Clinton Hull, Medical Director of Clinical Informatics at Singing River Health System.

Out-of-the-box efficiency gains

When Singing River began onboarding clinicians to Dragon Medical One, they found immediate benefit in its useful, pre-built navigational commands, which don’t require any customization.

Another advantage of Dragon Medical One over legacy speech recognition is that it’s effective immediately without additional voice training, which makes it easier to onboard new clinicians. “The implementation team worked with us to make the onboarding process smooth, and the lack of voice training was key to the quickness of adoption,” says Chad Broome, Lead Application Analyst at Singing River. 

Saving time with voice commands

In addition to the built-in shortcuts in Dragon Medical One, Singing River now uses over 1,000 voice commands to automate repetitive tasks. Clinicians can use simple phrases to tell Dragon to insert frequently used elements of clinical notes, place orders, review charts and results, and much more, saving them valuable time. 

“Dragon Medical One comes loaded with built-in commands that anybody can use, and Dragon will just execute them, without anybody having to do any more programming or modifying of those commands, for example, if you say something you didn’t want to, you can just say, ‘Scratch that,’ and Dragon will automatically delete what you said," said Dr. Hull.

Clinicians can also easily set up their own voice commands for other frequent tasks. For example, Dr. Hull can say, “Order morning labs,” and Dragon automatically completes the necessary steps to order his standard tests, giving him time back in his day. 

Some of Singing River’s clinicians also use PowerMic Mobile, the compatible smartphone app, to dictate notes away from their workstations, which was another incentive to transition to Dragon Medical One. 

Powering productivity—and returning time to care

Recently, the organization’s hospice nurses began using Dragon Medical embedded in Epic Rover, which lets them document notes quickly while they’re on the move, using speech-enabled virtual assistants to complete documentation directly in Epic. Less time spent typing notes gives the nurses more time to care for their patients. 

Singing River has achieved 88% adoption of Dragon Medical One, with hundreds of clinicians using more than 20,000 voice commands a month to streamline their workflows. This high level of adoption is partly due to the advanced functionality clinicians can now access, but also to the ease of onboarding new users. 

“We offer training, but because so many people are familiar with Dragon Medical One now, many come in already knowing the system and telling us what commands and AutoTexts they want,” says Broome. 

With little to no training, clinicians at Singing River can minimize the time and effort of completing accurate documentation; Dragon users are saving 40 hours a month by using AutoTexts to streamline routine workflows. Anytime, anywhere access in the cloud also means they’re not tied to their workstations. With Dragon, clinicians are freed from mundane manual tasks to focus on delivering high-quality care.