Aultman Hospital Saves Money, Saves Time, and Reduces Errors with VoiceOver PRO

THE SOLUTION: VOICEOVER PRO

About three months into Dr. Ravichandran’s time at Aultman, he contacted the physician in charge of IT and said the pathology department needed a system to help them improve their reporting. At that time, Ravichandran says, the hospital wanted them to try mTuitive. “But my problem with that was mTuitive does not offer full dictation capability,” Dr. Ravichandran explains. “It does help with synoptic reporting for cancer cases, which is like six or seven cases a day we sign out. But it wouldn't help with all of the routine report generation work, which we needed because we basically wanted a full voice recognition reporting system for all of our pathology reports for consistency. So mTuitive simply wasn't capable.”

It took more than six months of back and forth, with hospital IT leadership asking the pathology team to move completely to voice-recognized dictation. Dr. Ravichandran kept explaining that the Dragon system that Aultman provided was "not capable of the multi-part formatting of the typical pathology workload, as well as the cancer synoptic reports."

Once the team saw a demo of VoiceOver PRO in action, the pathologists quickly threw their support behind PRO. It took a few more months for hospital administrators to sign off on the deal, pressured by the imminent retirement of one of their transcriptionists. “We wanted to be sure that we were prepared for any eventuality where we may not have much transcription support,” Dr. Ravichandran says.

“With VoiceOver PRO, we finish our workload 30 to 45 minutes earlier, on average. This is due to instant report creation by dictation and immediate sign out. At the end of a busy day, that time savings is a huge difference maker for us.”

Pars Ravichandran

Pathologist

"We were able to eliminate two transcription positions by automating the process completely with PRO. That’s huge, because with staffing shortages we were able to take those positions and transition them elsewhere."

Allyson Blake

Laboratory Manager

Implementation of VoiceOver PRO

From Kickoff to Go Live in Just Four Months

The VoiceOver PRO project kickoff commenced at Aultman in August 2022. It took only four months for the pathology lab to go live in December 2022, in VoiceOver PRO's hosted environment.

The hosted VoiceOver PRO architecture is a centralized configuration in which the VoiceOver PRO Windows desktop software connects to a web-hosted database via the use of a shared set of services that live in Microsoft Azure (a cloud computing service). This allows for usage of the PRO application from any workstation. Utilizing a hosted back-end allows the laboratory to quickly utilize the benefits of PRO, without the need for a massive up-front IT investment.

“The Voicebrook team has been very attentive,” says Allyson Blake, laboratory manager of Aultman’s Canton campus. “Their project management was very good. Everything stayed on track and the support they provide to the pathologist is great. If I have any questions or need anything Voicebrook has been really good at getting back to me and keeping me updated, which I really appreciate.”

Voicebrook sent a three-person team to visit Aultman Hospital during the project kickoff, where they sat with each pathologist to observe their workflows. “In September we had some data gathering and starting in October we had a version of the PRO product available for use,” says Dr. Ravichandran. “And while using it on the fly, we kept changing and got it to work the way we wanted. We had two additional visits by the Voicebrook implementation team prior to the go live date. And during go live, Voicebrook was here to troubleshoot on the spot.”

Blake was impressed with how quickly the pathologists were able to learn the system and implement it. “They're very smart people and really great doctors,” Blake says. “But I do know that sometimes they don't mix well with technology, because there was other technology that we've tried to implement previously and it has been a rougher process. I was impressed with PRO because it was very smooth and all the issues were addressed in a timely manner. The staff has been really happy with the system."

VoiceOver PRO Solves a Crisis -- Before Even Going Live

In fact, the implementation went so well that Dr. Ravichandran was able to sign out more than 75 cases before PRO went live at Aultman.

It happened out of necessity, when their PA was off and one of the doctors was covering the gross room. This made the transcriptionist's workload explode, because they had to finish the gross description and also type up the final diagnosis reports. “She was the only transcriptionist available that week,” Dr. Ravichandran explains. “We had a crisis on our hands. I thought, let me just use PRO. I used PRO exclusively, because for the simple reports it works perfectly, and the cancer checklists are already something you pass through CAP so I knew it would work well.”

The other three lab staff had not extensively used voice recognition, yet they adapted very quickly to VoiceOver PRO. Dr. Ravichandran was particularly surprised at how well his colleague Dr. Morgan did with learning the system. "He didn’t have any prior experience. A couple of weeks later, he said that he liked PRO very much and told me, ‘I cannot go back to regular dictation now.’”

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