Transcription service gets thumbs up

Earlier this year, Heartland Health Region moved onto the new provincial service for dictating and transcribing reports about patient care events.

The service uses either Fluency Flex or Fluency for Transcription voice recognition technologies. With Fluency Flex, physicians dictate, self-edit and release their reports in real-time. Fluency for Transcription allows physicians and other care providers to create electronic audio files of their dictations. These are then typed up and edited by transcriptionists before being distributed. Every time someone dictates and a transcriptionist makes edits, the technology “learns” that person’s speech patterns and the accuracy of dictations improves. The systems allow for the automatic distribution of reports and both systems “pull” patient demographics. With these technologies, medical reports can make it to a patient’s chart in less time.

We caught up with two transcriptionists and two physicians in Heartland to find out what the transition to the provincial service has been like and how it has been working for them as care providers. Here is what they had to say:

Click here (or the photo below) to read a conversation with Naomi Kirkness, a transcriptionist at Kindersley & District Health Centre

Click here (or the photo below) to read a conversation with Kerri Berquist, a transcriptionist at Outlook & District Health Centre

Click here (or the photo below) to read a conversation with Dr. Lyle Williams, senior medical officer in Heartland and a physician in Unity and Dr. Ilana Streng-Coetzee, a physician in Unity