In recent years, urgent care clinics in the U.S. have experienced a surge in demand for walk-in services, with their numbers increasing by roughly 10% annually. However, despite their rapid growth, clinics have struggled to keep pace with demand, leading to long working hours for physicians and a pandemic of burnout. To address these challenges, clinics are increasingly turning to voice recognition technology to reduce the time required for clinical documentation and manual type-and-click tasks in the EMR, this is where the conversational ai technology is spurring. In this article, we will explore how clinical voice recognition technology boosts ROI and improves treatment by speeding up record-keeping and reducing physician burnout.
The Urgent Care Industry’s Struggle with Burnout
With a 46% increase in visits since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, urgent-care clinics have struggled to keep up with demand. Physicians working in these fast-paced clinics are particularly vulnerable to burnout, with emergency medicine and family practice providers ranking first and fourth among all specialties. Time-consuming charting and paperwork are leading factors contributing to burnout, with family and emergency medicine providers spending close to six hours per day documenting via their EHR. With continually increasing regulatory documentation demands, such as the 21st Century Cures Act, burnout rates have greatly increased in urgent care.
The Role of Medical Professionals in Embracing Technology
Medical professionals have always been at the forefront of adopting innovative solutions to enhance patient care and optimize their workflows. As the healthcare industry evolves, so do the challenges faced by physicians, nurses, and other medical staff. The growing demand for urgent care services, especially with the rise in patient visits during the COVID-19 pandemic, has put considerable strain on healthcare providers. However, medical professionals’ adaptability and dedication have driven the exploration and implementation of technology-driven solutions to overcome these obstacles. Voice recognition technology in urgent care has emerged as one such transformative solution.
The Solution: Medical Voice Recognition
To ease the burden and mitigate physician burnout, urgent care clinics increasingly rely on productivity-enhancing technologies such as voice recognition. Medical speech recognition software from Augnito is one such tool that enhances efficiency and reduces burnout. Augnito’s voice AI works with any EMR, and it is optimized to keep up with the high patient volumes and quick turnaround times typical of urgent care. Augnito’s features include customized templates for high-volume encounters such as annual physical exams, DoT physicals, and common illness diagnoses. Providers can reduce documentation times significantly by using these templates. The Augnito solution also supports macros that can be triggered by single-word voice commands, to enter pre-saved standardized text for wide-ranging medical diagnoses and procedures.
Enhancing Efficiency in Urgent Care Clinics
The healthcare industry has seen a paradigm shift in the use of medical voice recognition technology. Previously, healthcare professionals spent a substantial amount of time manually entering data into EMRs, leading to increased documentation hours and a higher risk of burnout. With Augnito’s voice AI, urgent care providers can now focus more on patient interactions and timely treatments rather than being buried under paperwork.
Customization and Personalization for Medical Encounters
One of the remarkable features of Augnito is its capability to offer customized templates for different medical encounters. This includes annual physical exams, Department of Transportation (DoT) physicals, and common illness diagnoses. These tailored templates enable medical professionals to capture patient data accurately and efficiently, saving valuable time and effort. By leveraging voice commands to trigger macros, providers can swiftly input standardized text for various medical diagnoses and procedures, ensuring comprehensive patient records.
Compliance and Billing Impacts
The ability to quickly enter comprehensive and visit-specific information into patient records via macros serves as medico-legal protection in demonstrating holistic concern for the patient beyond their immediate presentation. It also captures the complexity of the care provided. This not only results in more effective patient care but also supports compliance with recent overhauls in billing and coding in ambulatory care. The categorization of the complexity of care as “problems addressed” is now one of the necessary elements of the medical decision-making portion of clinical documentation that determines the billing level of service.
The Economic Impact: Boosting Revenue and Reducing Costs
Augnito not only reduces physician burnout and supports compliance, but it also increases revenue by allowing providers to see more patients. It helps reduce costs by eliminating the need for scribes and medical transcriptionists. A typical urgent-care provider sees 4.5 patients a day. Augnito can save clinicians three hours per day on documentation, potentially allowing them to see an extra 13.5 patients in the same amount of time. With the cost of each urgent care center encounter averaging $171, this translates to an additional $2,308 in revenue per physician per day, by using Augnito. Given that the cost of an annual Augnito subscription is a small fraction of this potential added revenue, positive ROI can be realized in less than one day.
Improved Patient Care
Augnito medical speech-to-text software enables urgent-care providers to reduce the burden of clinical documentation, thereby increasing both meaningful face time between doctors and their patients and the number of patients seen. Augnito can help urgent-care clinics minimize provider burnout by improving efficiency and maximizing revenue by increasing patient throughput, all without reducing standards of patient care. Patients receive faster and more accurate diagnoses and treatments, and physicians can focus on delivering quality care without the added stress of excessive documentation.
Patient-Centric Approach: Delivering Quality Care
At the core of every healthcare provider’s mission is the delivery of quality care to patients. By adopting medical voice recognition technology like Augnito, urgent care clinics create a patient-centric environment where physicians can focus on their patients’ well-being without being burdened by excessive documentation tasks. This improved focus on patient interactions leads to more accurate diagnoses and timely treatments, fostering better patient outcomes and an overall positive experience for both patients and medical professionals.
Conclusion
Urgent care clinics and voice AI together offer a promising solution to challenges in the industry, paving the way for a more efficient and patient-focused healthcare system. Augnito medical speech recognition software is one such tool that enhances efficiency and reduces burnout. By reducing the time required for clinical documentation and manual type-and-click tasks in the EMR, Augnito can help urgent-care clinics minimize provider burnout by improving efficiency and maximizing revenue by increasing patient throughput, all without reducing standards of patient care. With the urgent care industry’s rapid growth, it’s essential to incorporate productivity-enhancing technologies like Augnito to ensure clinics keep pace with demand and deliver quality care to patients.
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