The power of speech-to-text in home-based care is not merely in the logistics of care delivery. It’s in the ways that care makes a tangible difference in the lives of patients, and in the work experience of clinicians.
“My love for home services comes from the joy I see in the faces of our patients who can continue living with their families,” says Jamie Brown, vice president of home services with Vancouver, Washington-based Eden Health. “[And] my passion is serving as an advocate for our frontline clinicians.”
The company operates 17 home health, hospice and home care agencies in six states, making for a high number of clinical notes and patient care plans. To improve the care documentation process for its clinicians — and ultimately its patients — Eden Health adopted nVoq speech recognition software in Homecare Homebase’s PointCare EHR.
“Before using speech to text to document care, our clinicians were typing hours’ worth of documentation for our patients,” Brown says. “On average, our clinicians are documenting admissions 30 minutes faster [than before]. Multiply that by the number of admissions a clinician documents in a day, and that’s a significant time savings.”
With nVoq, Eden Health clinicians can document care while they’re in the patient’s home, with the patient, meaning they are no longer documenting care after their scheduled shift.
“That’s good for Eden Health’s bottom line: It means we’re not paying overtime,” Brown says. “I want to free up our clinicians to focus on patient care, rather than worrying about spending hours every night documenting in the EHR. With Eden Health, we need to do this across 16 different offices in five states.”
They are achieving this with nVoq. Here are three best practices that Brown and the team at Eden Health recommend for other agencies deploying speech-to-text technology.
Choose speech software that supports HIPAA compliance
Making the move from manual note-taking to speech recognition is more than just asking clinicians to use the technology already on their phones.
“Siri can help you locate the closest gas station, but it doesn’t support HIPAA compliance,” Brown says.
To help its clinicians, Eden Health had to turn off the speech option on their tablets and smartphones, and bring them the HIPAA-compliant nVoq technology. Another key benefit of using a speech-to-text tool created for home-based care: built-in home health care and hospice medical vocabulary. That’s another time-saver.
Select a go-to contact for clinicians out in the field
To support clinicians out in the field while they learn to document using speech to text, Eden Health gives them the name, phone number and email address of a person who can answer their questions. That person is also in charge of getting clinicians excited about the software and how it can benefit them.
Confirm that the patient understands their care plan
Because the clinician is documenting by voice in real time, the patient in the home can hear what they’re saying about the visit and their care plan, and the plan for the next visit. This is a win, Brown says.
“Documenting care plans by voice really helps us from a regulatory and audit perspective as well,” she adds.
And while HIPAA-compliant speech-to-text tools benefit the patients, it is benefiting the clinicians too.
“Eden Health was awarded a Great Place to Work® certification for the second year in a row for 2020-2021,” Brown says. “But we got consistent feedback for years that documenting care in the EHR was complicated and it takes a lot of time. Investing in speech-to-text is helping our clinicians focus on patient care, and they’re happier as a result.”
This article is sponsored by nVoq. To learn more about how speech-to-text technology can help your agency, visit sayit.nvoq.com.
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