Physicians are pushing the federal Health & Human Services Department to include physician narratives in the proposed regulations for electronic health records. Doctors use the narrative to expand on an assessment and offer subjective and objective evaluations of a case, as well as outline the treatment plan. Some doctors use speech recognition technology for their narratives in EHR systems. The public has 60 days to comment on the HHS regulations.

"No matter how good [EHR records] are, you'll never get the flavored nuance of the patient's [situation] if you don't have an unstructured note," said Dr. Steven Schiff, the medical director and service chief of cardiology at Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center, in Fountain Valley, Calif., in an eWEEK interview.

I recently met Marianne Kleen from Textware Solutions at the AHDI meeting and she expressed how happy many medical transcriptionists were that they were able to use Instant Text within Emdat's InScribe typing platform. Marianne gave me this hyperlink to an excellent article.

Instant Text is a great productivity tool used with Emdat's InScribe.

Textware Solutions, developer and publisher of Instant Text, counts among its customers a large number of Emdat users happy to increase their productivity in the process of clinical documentation. While working in Emdat they can seamlessly utilize the knowledge base of their Instant Text glossaries that contain the medical words and phrases they have to deal with every day. The unique features of Instant Text allow them to have tens of thousands of words, drug names, phrases, addresses right at their fingertips with...