Forsyth Foot & Ankle Associates improves the clinician experience
Save time, improve physician and patient experience
Clinicians everywhere face the daily challenge of delivering the best possible patient experience and care while handling a growing documentation burden. And physician‑owners have the added challenge of ensuring accurate documentation is available quickly so that patient bills can be sent out as soon as possible.
Learn how Forsyth Foot & Ankle Associates sees significant time savings, an improved quality of life for clinicians, and a streamlined patient experience with Dragon Medical One.
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Michael C. McGlamry D.P.M., FACFAS
Forsyth Foot & Ankle Associates
Challenge
Reducing the time spent completing clinical notes and improving documentation turnaround times.
Solution
With Dragon Medical One, clinicians can dictate notes directly into the patient record during consultations and treatments, reducing the need to work on documentation after clinic time.
Results
Significant time savings, an improved quality of life for clinicians, and a streamlined patient experience.
Background
Forsyth Foot & Ankle Associates is a physician-owned podiatry center in Cumming, Georgia that provides a wide range of expert podiatric care—from arthritis treatment to surgical reconstruction. Michael C. McGlamry D.P.M., FACFAS, a podiatrist with 30 years of clinical experience and the owner of Forsyth Foot & Ankle Associates, knows all too well the challenges that documentation brings.
"At the end of the day, I would spend up to two hours finishing my notes and getting them into billing so the bills could go out,” he says. “If I had to run out or go to the OR, things would start to pile up, so I would sometimes be two or three days behind.”
With Dragon Medical One, Nuance’s AI‑powered clinical documentation companion, Dr. McGlamry can now use advanced speech recognition to reduce his documentation burden.
More accurate speech recognition and faster documentation
Dragon Medical One enables clinicians to document each patient encounter accurately and efficiently by dictating their notes directly into the EHR and using voice‑enabled shortcuts to streamline everyday workflows.
As a veteran user of medical speech recognition, Dr. McGlamry has been impressed by the capabilities of Dragon Medical One. “Unlike earlier speech recognition tools, there’s little to no training required, and the accuracy is extremely high right away,” he says. “Dragon Medical One gets almost all podiatry terms right, which aren’t mainstream medical terms, without any training. It really has been pretty impressive.”
One of the most valuable capabilities in Dragon Medical One is the AutoText feature, which enables clinicians to insert blocks of commonly used text into their notes with a simple voice command. “Creating AutoTexts is very straightforward,” says Dr. McGlamry. “For example, I’ve set it up for common injections, so instead of dictating a paragraph, I can say three keywords and it pops up. All I have to do is put in the laterality, and the specific toe if it’s for a digital procedure.”
Saving time and improving the patient experience
For Dr. McGlamry, the biggest benefit of Dragon Medical One is the time it saves. “I’m typically finished with the day’s documentation less than an hour after the end of the clinic,” he says. “I’d say, very conservatively, that I’m getting back three or four hours a week. I’m not finishing notes in the evening or working on them during weekends. It’s made a big difference to my quality of life.”
The switch to Dragon Medical One is also reducing costs for Forsyth Foot & Ankle Associates compared to the virtual scribe service it had used. “They said I’d be able to see more patients because I wouldn’t have to catch up with notes. But by the time the virtual scribe had finished my note, and then I had to go in and edit and correct their errors, I wasn’t saving much time at all—and it was costing us $2,500 a month. So Dragon Medical One gives us tremendous savings compared to the scribe service.”
Dictating notes during patient encounters also helps improve documentation accuracy—and the patient experience. “Because I’m doing it in front of them right after I’ve taken the history, and right as I’m doing the exam, the accuracy of what’s being recorded is higher,” says Dr. McGlamry. “When I’m dictating their history of present illness, especially with a new patient, they’re nodding their head and going, ‘Wow—he really got what I said!’ They know that what’s being put in their chart is accurate to what they’ve given me.”