Edge Hill Health Centre

Telephone dictation: just what the doctor ordered

Established in the 1960's, Edge Hill Health Centre is a multi-specialty medical practice serving close to 10,000 patients in the Liverpool area. Documentation at the practice used to be a tricky task, with all nine doctors relying on analogue recorders to dictate their notes. "The recorders would keep breaking down and tapes would get lost or broken," explains Angela Broda, Practice Manager. This not only caused administrative problems, such as a document turnaround of several days, but it also imposed a financial cost to the practice. This is what brought Broda to contact Crescendo. "After evaluating the different options, we opted for the DigiScribe-XL Telephone Dictation system, which was intuitive for users and required no additional hardware but standard phones."

Document turnaround: down from several days to a couple of hours

To initiate a dictation, doctors simply dial a given extension number. To complete a dictation, they just have to hang up. Completed voice files can be easily prioritised and secretaries have them displayed on their work list in real-time thanks to DigiPlayer-IP. Since this is all digital, no more time is wasted completing tapes or delivering them by hand. The routing of files is now fully automated while data is kept totally safe. As a result, the average turnaround time for documents varies from 2 to 24 hours maximum, as a opposed to several days with the old analogue workflow.

"No comparison"

"Our old analogue system versus DigiScribe-XL? There is no comparison. DigiScribe-XL is completely maintenance free," insists Broda. "On the transcription side, real-time access allows our secretaries to plan and even share their workload much more easily. They are also very fond of the crystal-clear sound quality, which led way to a decrease in transcription errors" concludes Broda.

Edge Hill Health Centre
Key Figures
  • Population served: 9,666
  • 9 Doctors
  • 3 Secretaries
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