When Buffalo Heart Group's director of administration Brad Hall first saw Dragon Naturally Speaking demonstrated at a conference in 2005, he was eager to test it out. The practice was in the midst of rolling out an electronic medical records (EMR) platform and Brad was hopeful that speech recognition could be integrated. His goal was to simplify the transcription process and eliminate the practice's rising medical transcription expense, which was already close to $150,000 a year and climbing.

Six months ago, Brad and his team, which included Kathy Heary, Buffalo Heart Group's privacy officer and health information manager, made the commitment to use speech recognition as part of the EMR platform. Brad and Kathy recognized that EMR and speech recognition could help the practice achieve its goals of increased overall efficiency and increased quality of service, while enabling providers to do more with less. However, they also understood there would be resistance on the part of some of the providers to adopting speech recognition.

So the duo began the important roll-out by identifying potential speech recognition champions within the practice and partnering with Achieve Results to provide the important training component. Champions were important, explains Brad, as a way to gain acceptance of a new documentation methodology among the practice as a whole. Although speech recognition has made great strides in being accepted within the medical community, says Brad, he reminded himself that patience would be key.

Fortunately, the group immediately had some success stories with doctors who elected to adopt Dragon and be trained in its use. Those successes continue. Today, there are six providers using speech recognition on a regular basis and several more have registered for training. This gradual adoption pace is exactly what Brad was hoping for: "we wanted to build momentum," he says.

What has been surprising to Brad and Kathy is that they anticipated that several of the group's providers would be somewhat reluctant to modify their documentation protocol and convert to the new voice recognition dictation platform. Surprisingly, these providers have actually embraced the new technology and have found that they really like it. In addition, all the providers in the practice's new satellite office have already become converts in a matter of weeks.

Besides the cost savings, many of the practice's providers value being able to complete documentation on a real-time basis. "There is no more waiting for a letter to come back for review," explains Brad, "and letters are more concise because we're striving for efficiency." The doctors who are using speech recognition are reveling in the fact that documents are already done in the patients' charts at the end of the day.

"Our ultimate goal is to eliminate transcription costs entirely," he reports, with a first-year target of cutting transcription costs in half. They are already well on their way, with more doctors using Dragon than anticipated at this point in the process.

"We are realizing success," he says.