Dragon VR dictation: A couple of weeks ago, I sent an invitation out to all clinicians who have the option to dictate their notes to enroll in the Dragon Voice Recognition rollout. Since January, we have been piloting this technology on a limited basis. We have learned a great deal including the fact that this technology is not everyone's cup of tea. The accuracy rates are high, especially when one speaks quickly and clearly, but it takes a measure of both patience and commitment to master. Right now, the plan is to give this software to those interested who currently have higher dictation costs and see where that next step takes us. I am hopeful that we will be able to offer this technology to any and all-comers over the next year or two.
MPages: We are currently piloting this new screen with six docs and their MAs. The MPage is what the Overview tab should have been in the first place. The best description is that it looks and almost acts like an iGoogle page. All elements found in the menu to the left are flattened out on a single page in widget format. These widgets can be moved around and defaulted to display as opened/closed. So it's easy to not only see a patient's meds or problems, but also easy to just right into that section of the chart to make any changes or additions. So far, the MPage has met a great deal of enthusiasm. We are trying to determine a number of things: satisfaction, ease of use, opportunities for workflow redesign, i.e. staff entering patient health information traditionally entered by docs.
The iPad!: Kishi Talati, our new assoc. med. dir., got his hands on an ipad and, Mac-geek that he is, has begun to master this new device for use on the Baystate network. Look forward to news about this and the possibility of taking advantage of this and other Apple connectivity.
I had a chance this weekend to use the iPAD on rounds in the ICU. The good news is that you CAN access CIS and perform most tasks pretty well: accessing your inbox, patient lists, rounding tools, Up-To-Date, APACHE, iView (bedside flowsheets) reviewing labs, Web paging, etc. The level of effort to accomplish these tasks (where 0 = newbie and 10 = Uber-geek) is roughly a 6. This assumes that one of your partners (Thanks, Kishi) has provided you with a link to download the Citrix app and directions to find the correct CIS prod icon! (It's not the obvious one...) Battery life is decent - the iPAD was 96% charged when I started on Friday afternoon, 56% at the end of the day, and without charging, 17% by noontime on Saturday. I found it easiest to use our custom MICU and SICU "Quickviews" to find the information I needed, although the full left-hand menu was accessible. Now, the downside: I was locked out of my account Friday afternoon, presumably because I tried to access the wrong app one too many times. That required a call to the help desk and a password reset. The scroll bar takes some time to learn: you need to hold your finger on it for a second before starting to scroll. Presumably this is a Citrix/network delay, but it is annoying at first. Xrays are pixellated, but this may be a communication issue or default setting, and we're going to investigate. Writing notes was difficult with the screen locked into landscape because the keyboard covers the bottom half of the screen. This was also the first time I'd used an iPAD for more than a few minutes, and part of the learning curve is investigating the time-saving possibilities of two- and three-finger tapping.
ReplyDeleteThe bottom line is that a dedicated techie can find a way to make the iPAD work with Cerner, but there are some enhancements (like mPages) that are needed before we can roll this out to the average user. I'll try to post a full report in the next few days.