About Glenpark Medical Practice

Dr Jonathan Harness is a GP Partner at Glenpark Medical Practice in Dunston, Gateshead and is the Chief Clinical Information Officer for Newcastle Gateshead CCG.

Glenpark was founded in 1905 and has a network of around 9300 patients. The practice prides itself on offering the highest quality modern healthcare, whilst being grounded in traditional patient, family, and community-centred values.

The team consists of 11 permanent doctors, up to 3 registrars, 4 nurses, a health care assistant, and a phlebotomist, we can offer our patients a wide choice of skills, knowledge, and experience.

Continue reading to discover Dr Harness’ journey from laborious typing to quick and efficient speech recognition.

Typing is “Too Slow” for Dr Harness’ Demand

As you can imagine someone with two very important roles within the healthcare field is bound to have a large amount of documentation to produce. Dr Harness’ workflow consists mainly of creating various patient consultations, medical records and email communication.

Prior to working with VoicePower Ltd, Dr Harness was typing the above reporting by hand. Although a competent touch-typist, he was still aware that this wasn’t the most efficient way of working, as he explains:

“I was conscious that typing was slow, and it took up a considerable amount of my time.” – Dr Jonathan Harness

With such large workloads like Dr Harness’, it is no surprise that 71% of GP trainees often feel worn out at the end of the day, and 22% reported that they felt burnt out to a high or very high degree because of their work (Pulse, 2021).

Dr Harness decided to consider other options for capturing his clinical documentation and reached out to The Speech Recognition People and Nuance Elite Healthcare Partner, VoicePower Ltd.

Discovering Dragon DMO Speech Recognition

Speech recognition is the technology that is taking the healthcare sector by storm, offering the ability to capture words on a screen 3x faster than manually typing. Don’t believe us? Watch our Dragon versus typing challenge video here.

As well as being more efficient, a specific medical version of the technology is also available, called Dragon Medical One.

These benefits of speech recognition caught Dr Harness’ attention when speaking to speech workflow experts, at VoicePower Ltd. Not only would this method limit the time spent on documentation, but it would also make his clinical notes more detailed and thorough.

It was therefore decided that Dr Harness would begin a trial of Dragon DMO so that he could test the levels of accuracy and see how well it would fit into his daily work.

Real-Life Results

Interested in the impact that speech recognition may be having on his working life, Dr Harness decided to begin a study, comparing DMO to typing. 200 consultations were analysed: 90 without using speech recognition at all and 110 using a mixture of typing and digital dictation.

The findings were quite interesting:

“For telephone consultations, there was a 1.6-minute per consultation saving (17%) using Dragon. For face-to-face consultations, there was a saving of 0.9 minutes per consultation or around 46%.” – Dr Jonathan Harness

Dr Harness went on to confirm that “speech recognition, once the user and the product have been trained, can make a significant time saving to the clinician.”

“The greater saving comes from the use of predefined shortcuts available with Dragon DMO. It also reduces the burden on administrative staff as well as speeding the turnaround time for letters.” – Dr Jonathan Harness

The integration with EMIS and other clinical systems was also a positive in Dr Harness’ books as he explains: “Dragon DMO can increase access by speeding up data entry and therefore the turnaround time from one patient to the next.”

Watch Dr Harness using Dragon Medical One within EMIS here:

Working with VoicePower

Support and guidance throughout any technology deployment is the key to success and return on investment. Dr Harness completely understood this and opted for our 12-month support contract and remote Dragon training too.

As well as showing Dr Harness the various features within Dragon and how to maximise productivity with these features, our trainers also looked at his workflow and advised the most effective way of working. Each training session delivered by VoicePower is personal and specific to that user.

“The training was thorough and the system is very intuitive.” – Dr Jonathan Harness

It wasn’t just the training that Dr Harness spoke highly of:

“Voicepower was very helpful in getting the system set up and very quick to respond to enquiries and provided remote support the same day when I had some set-up issues surrounding permissions. They were flexible when I needed to coordinate with the IT supplier.” – Dr Jonathan Harness

Lastly, Dr Harness was pleased that: “When I have had queries, VoicePower support has responded very quickly and problems have been resolved same day (this has only occurred twice in the year – once when I had to rebuild the computer).”