Hiding Patty Chapter 12

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Hiding Patty
Chapter 12 of 33
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Time frameAugust-to-
September 2009
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Locations

  • Dr. York's office
  • Tricia York's home

Characters

Summary

Molly's interview revealed that she has several years’ experience as a medical receptionist, and as a nurse’s aide. She was hired and working less than an hour after Betty left. Dr. York made one of Molly's duties to have every patient, new or returning, fill out a fresh detailed medical history. Within a week Dr. York, Heather and Molly were a well-oiled team that worked well together.

Patient records were the biggest problem - first of all, Dr. Luce hadn't written down very much, second, any new patient records took a lot of time to create and third the patient records that did exist took more time to update. Dr. York took the existing records of the next-day's patients home to review, and she was using more home time to create or update records for the patients that she had seen that day. She experimented using a pocket voice recorder and asking Molly to transcribe the tapes but Molly didn't have the medial vocabulary to do a proper job.

Frequently she discussed practice-related issues with Dr. Metarie and once commented that a decent voice-to-text computer system would help. Very soon Gene introduced her to Wendy Carter as someone who has "forgotten more about (voice to text systems) than you and I will ever know". He continues with "she has some problems she’s had to learn to live with the hard way, so her perspective on the world is a little unusual.”

Tricia's first impression of Wendy is clinical - that she's a very low-functioning quadriplegic. Despite her situation, she's cheerful and helpful.

Wendy demonstrates "Jeeves" to Dr. York, who is impressed. Gene and Wendy explain that Jeeves largely replaces a human caregiver, and that the person who has been liberated is not Wendy, but her mother. Gene also explains that Wendy is a writer of "Epic Fantasy" and the discussion of voice-to-text software continues.

Wendy demonstrates the system she uses by starting a new file and having a conversation with Dr. York, describing some of the features and nuances as the system transcribes the entire conversation. Dr. York was very impressed, as was Dr. Metarie who commented that he didn’t realize these systems were that advanced... his medical transcriptionist would be out of a job.

As she drove home Dr. York reflected that Wendy was not what she expected a quadriplegic to be, not in the slightest! If anyone had taken a lemon and turned it into lemonade, she had.

Also Mentioned

  • Meghan Solerai