Mathematically there is a great deal of time wasted with dictations, particularly if you are in a system with EMR - you pretty much have to type everything. When you admit a patient you have to type up their history & physical. Progress notes, orders, everything is typed. So every individual has to expend effort typing, and there are no alternatives to it. But the annoying part comes with dictating discharge summaries, why not just paste the sections into a document rather than call a phone number, speak everything we type, and then have to proofread the transcribed version at a later point in time? Think about how many evenings you waste in this process...
If you were to assign a value to the amount of time spent typing we could call it "N". The average person can speak between three and ten words in the same amount of time it takes to type in one. You could then say the amount of time speaking would be the logarithm of N (either lnN or logN depending on if you were the three or ten word speaker). The overall time it takes to *paste* text is 1 since it is [CTRL-V]. Here are the orders of time:
pasting - O{1}
typing - O{N} * O{1}
speaking typed text (also accounting for typing in the info first) - O{N}*log{N} or O{N}*ln{N}
You can see that the greatest time spent is what you see for speaking typed text. Can the GME afford to have everyone wasting log{N} time? The other alternative is to simply say "smooth" when dictating the hospital course. I only have one more month where I will have to dictate anything and this looks the most promising :-)
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