The use of self-edit dictation software for clinicians at Regina’s Gardens Community Health Centre is receiving praise for how it has led to more detailed patient reports and more efficient dictation practices.

The Gardens Community Health Centre, the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA), and 3sHealth worked together on a pilot program to introduce Fluency Direct, a program that instantly transcribes what a clinician says directly into their patients’ electronic medical record. As a clinician dictates, Fluency Direct learns their voice, accent, and speech patterns to transcribe with even greater accuracy. Every clinician has their own profile that can move with them to different health-care sites.

The program allows clinicians to dictate their notes within the allotted appointment time after a patient visit, making information more readily available as it moves with the patient along their health-care journey. This is an important contribution to team-based community health care.

Data collected at the centre shows great improvements for patients and families since implementation. For example, a Gardens pharmacist has been able to reduce the average time between seeing a patient and completing their documentation from almost three hours to 45 minutes – a 74 per cent reduction.