Mackay Base Hospital gives clinicians more time to care with clinical artificial intelligence

Mackay Hospital and Health Service serves around 180,000 people in a range of regional, community, and rural settings in Queensland. One of these settings — Mackay Base Hospital — is the referral hospital for the region, seeing around 271,000 outpatient visits and caring for more than 81,200 people in its Emergency Department each year.

Mackay Base Hospital is one of the most digitally advanced hospitals in Queensland. It recently introduced Nuance’s cloud-based clinical speech recognition solution, Dragon Medical One, integrated with its Cerner ieMR, to provide powerful new documentation capabilities.

Using Dragon Medical One, Nuance PowerMic, and Nuance PowerMic Mobile, clinicians in the Emergency Department can document their decision-making using only their voice and automatically create accurate, detailed clinical notes in the Cerner ieMR. And as Dr Pieter Nel, Chief Digital Director Medical Services at Mackay, told us, the hospital and its clinicians have already seen some remarkable results.

“It gave us quite considerable time back, and we talk about at least two minutes per patient being given back to every clinician, which is a 30% reduction of time spent on documentation,” said Dr Nel.

“We have the time to look at the wellbeing of our staff, to connect to the nursing team much easier and understand their challenges,” said Dr Nel. “We have time to check up on the wellbeing of RMOs and support them in the challenges of a busy emergency department.”

Analytics also showed that documentation created in Dragon Medical One was more accurate and detailed. Now, creating complete documentation in real time allows Mackay’s Emergency Department clinicians to improve patient flow and safety.

“For clinicians to do documentation in real time is very important. When you do it in real time, you remember the finer detail, and you’ve done it in a structured way — that improves the quality of the notes,” said Dr Nel.

“What we also found is that our notes are much more comprehensive, longer, more detailed, but we still gained those two minutes. We could immediately see the advantage of voice-to-text: typing at 30 words per minute with a lot of mistakes versus 170 words a minute.”

“It’s definitely improved our discharge summaries,” said Dr Nel. “By the time a patient gets to his car, or the taxi or ambulance is taking him home, the discharge summary handover note has been completed, and an admin person has emailed it through to the GP.”

Now that clinicians can use Dragon Medical One to create documentation three to four times faster than typing, they feel more in control — and they’re able to switch off at the end of their shift.

The early results from Dragon Medical One are very promising for Mackay and its patients. As anybody who’s worked in an Emergency Department will tell you, when clinicians have more time to spend with their patients — and with their families — the outcomes are better for everyone.

Learn more here.