If you’re associated with a physician practice, you’ve probably been the target of at least one EMR/EHR vendor’s sales pitch in the past few months. And the pitch is a good one: EMR/EHR implementations can make practices more efficient, provide better patient outcomes and best yet, make you eligible for a portion of the federal incentives tied to EMR/EHR implementation.

But before you charge off on an EMR/EHR implementation, consider how the the system will impact the content and quality of your clinical documentation. Most EMR/EHR’s rely on clinicians to manually input the majority of the patient information. The clinician sits at a terminal, usually in front of the patient, and types in only the most basic of information on the encounter in an effort to move as quickly as possible to the next patient.

While this may work for some practices in certain environments, many physicians feel that this inability to thoroughly document their diagnosis and treatment plans in detail is a serious drawback of the EMR model. As noted in a recent study of physicians done by Nuance Healthcare Solutions, over 74% of physicians surveyed felt that the “cookie cutter templates” used by most EMR’s in documenting patient encounters are a serious challenge to realizing the full potential of the EMR.

So how best to thoroughly document the patient encounter? In the same study, physicians cited the ability to speak the patient narrative directly into the EMR as being one of the top 5 most important features of the EMR. And this makes sense; most physicians are used to dictating and in fact, prefer dictation to any other form of documentation.

So how to bridge the gap between the template based efficiency of the EMR and the physician’s desire to more thoroughly document the patient encounter by dictating a narrative portion of the report? What is required is a seamless method of allowing the physician to dictate the narrative section of the report without having to pick up the phone, type in a text box or login to a separate system.

Landmark’s Integrated Dictation Solutions allow clinicians to dictate directly from the PC while accessing the EHR using a handheld speech microphone. There is no need to log into a different system or enter any patient or demographic information. The resulting dictation is sent electronically to our servers where it is run through our speech recognition engine. Physicians can choose to edit the speech recognized document themselves or have Landmark provide the editing. The narrative appears in the templated document and is ready for signature.

Best of all, there is no hardware or user licenses to buy. You purchase only what you need, when you need it.