Physician dictation times before and after implementation of Syngo Workflow and Nuance

Objectives: The Joint Commission (TJC) utilizes physician dictation times as a quality metric for comparing healthcare organizations. To better facilitate this metric, the Marshfield Clinic implemented Nuance, a voice recognition system along with syngo Workflow (sWF), a program used to manage workflow in a radiology department, to track procedures, enable physician dictation of patient reports, and eventually uploads finalized reports to Combined Medical Records (CMR); without this process the patient reports would not be visible to referring physicians. This study analyzes the time it takes from the completion of a nuclear medicine procedure to physician report upload to CMR before and after the implementation of syngo WorkFlow and Nuance.

Methods: Two hundred -three patient request end times and physician dictated times were gathered 13 weeks before and 13 weeks after the go live date for sWF and Nuance. The difference between the end times and dictated times was documented and averaged for each time period. Minimum, maximum, and average standard deviation values were also calculated and documented. It is important to note that data was not analyzed four days before and twelve days after the go live date of sWF due to the WannaCry Crisis that occurred during that time period at the Marshfield Medical Center.

Results: Before sWF and Nuance were implemented, the average patient turnaround time was 72 minutes with a minimum time of 2 minutes, a maximum time of 600 minutes, and an average standard deviation of ±103 minutes. After implementation, the average time is 101 minutes with a minimum time of 7 minutes, a maximum time of 534 minutes, and an average standard deviation of ±95 minutes. Conclusion: Theoretically, sWF and Nuance should decrease the patient report turnover rate, however, this is not currently being witnessed at our facility. It is presumed that overtime, once the physicians get more comfortable with the program, sWF and Nuance should indeed minimize the patient report turnaround times.