Cowes Medical Centre reaps benefits of switching to Lexacom

The Cowes Medical Centre on the Isle of Wight hasn’t looked back since switching from an old tape system to Lexacom digital dictation and workflow software.

When the tapes were about to be discontinued, the Cowes Medical Centre spoke to another practice that was already using Lexacom digital dictation. It was recommended as a much more efficient system and the medical centre is delighted with the results.

“The tape system was okay but old tapes would wear out and the sound quality became poor,” said Practice Manager Karen Woodford. The secretarial team has noticed a big improvement since making the switch to Lexacom 3. “The sound quality is very clear, making it a lot easier to type letters quickly and accurately,” continued Karen.

One of the biggest benefits has been the ability to prioritise workloads. Urgent letters are highlighted on the screen, so it is much easier for the secretaries to organise their work. With analogue dictation, the secretaries would have to play the tape to find the urgent letter amongst all the other dictations before they could make a start on transcribing.

“Another plus is the fact that you can go back to dictations that are days or weeks old and listen to them again – these would have been lost when we used tapes,” Karen added.

Dr Andrew Whiteley, Managing Director of Lexacom, said, “GP practices are under mounting pressure to operate more efficiently in order to meet NHS targets and deliver the best quality service to their patients. Lexacom is designed to help them do exactly that and I’m delighted to hear that our software is proving so useful at Cowes Medical Centre.”

As part of Lexacom’s free updates policy, Cowes Medical Practice is continuing to benefit from new enhancements and software updates being added to Lexacom, while support is provided by the company’s in house technical help team.

Lexacom digital dictation and workflow software was designed by doctors for doctors. It is intuitive to use and has been shown to speed up the referral process significantly when compared to analogue dictation. GPs and secretaries benefit from the system, which reduces the amount of time spent on admin, enabling more time to be spent delivering high quality patient care.