Tech & Tools

Social Service Agencies Tap Speech Recognition to Address Critical Resource Issues, Improve Care for Children and Families

Nuance Communications, Inc. provides more than 15,000 social service professionals in leading agencies in states such as Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas with Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition to improve the quality of case documentation, reduce the turnaround time and administrative costs associated with case documentation and workflows, and improve client care.

Because of the increasing and often overwhelming volume of reporting and documentation required within social service organizations, agencies carry high administrative costs and experience long turnaround times for critical case reports, as well as excessive staff turnover due to the heavy burden of manually transcribing case notes. A single caseworker can spend hours meeting with families, and then return to the office to spend several more hours typing notes from the day. The alternative traditionally offered is a costly manual transcription service that can jeopardize quality of care by delaying potentially critical and time-sensitive client information.

Using Dragon, social service agencies can reduce administrative and transcription costs and improve client service by enabling caseworkers to quickly, accurately and more comprehensively complete case notes and reports by voice. Rather than typing, social service professionals dictate their notes directly into Dragon, cutting their reporting time by nearly two-thirds, and in some cases eliminating the cost of a manual transcription service. In addition, agents can dictate their notes into a digital voice recorder while they are in the field; audio files from the recorder are then fed into Dragon and automatically transcribed, again reducing the time, cost, and frustration typically associated with case reporting. Dragon can also work with an organization's Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System, an automated case management system that makes it simple to integrate into an agency's existing workflow.

“It's clear that most people enter the human services field not because they want to write reports and create paperwork, but because they want to help people," says Peter Mahoney, senior vice president and general manager of Dragon, Nuance. "Dragon allows social service professionals to cut the time that they spend on reporting—in many cases by over half—so that they can focus on the real priority of providing exceptional client care."

For more information, visit Dragon for Social Services.