BRUNSWICK — The Oasis Health Network, Inc. of Brunswick got some much needed assistance recently when New England Medical Transcription (NEMT) volunteered to provide free documentation for doctors.

Oasis Health Network, Inc. is a free health clinic that serves the greater Brunswick area, providing health care to the uninsured residents of the Bath, Brunswick, Harpswell and Freeport area.

NEMT is a Woolwich-based medical transcription company that transcribes doctors’ voice recordings into patient records.

Denise Mungen-Kerina, business manager at Oasis Health Network, said the free transcription saves doctors hours each day.

“NEMT has made four providers very, very happy,” she said. “Nothing that we have here is modern — they were writing all the patient notes on paper. Being able to dictate rather than take an hour-and-a-half or two hours to write it all down has been a huge benefit.”

Four doctors are currently dictating to NEMT as part of the pilot project. All told, the network has 35 doctors who will eventually be added into the transcription system.

“NEMT has been outstanding,” Mungen-Kerina said. “When Linda Sullivan approached us and said she wanted to help us, we knew that kind of comprehensive record-keeping would be a big key to our overall care plan.”

Oasis Health Network, Inc. got its start more than a decade ago at the homeless shelter in Brunswick. At the time, shelter residents were being taken to the emergency room regularly for care, so administrators decided to put volunteer doctors on call to evaluate sick residents to see if they needed an ER, or just ongoing health care.

In 1995, Oasis began operating a Tuesday night clinic providing support to locals who weren’t homeless, but who were uninsured. In 2004, Mid Coast Hospital offered the organization a permanent facility for Tuesday night free health clinics.

“Once a week just wasn’t enough though,” Mungen-Kerina said. “We found the illnesses were great. It wasn’t just someone coming in with bronchitis; they were coming in with diabetes and other chronic diseases.”

So they began providing specialties clinics, such as diabetes, mental health and high blood pressure clinics.

Now, the network is providing a primary-care model, and that’s where NEMT comes in. Patients at the volunteer clinic are being assigned to primary care physicians. Each time the patient comes, he or she will see the same doctor, allowing them to establish a relationship and know that a single physician is overseeing their overall health. Part of the primary-care model, however, is record-keeping and documentation. In order for a doctor to effectively manage a patient’s overall health and particularly, chronic conditions, the doctor needs clear and consistent records of the patient’s symptoms, medications and clinic visits.

NEMT is providing those records, free of charge.

“We are members of this community too and we care a lot about the people here,” said Linda Sullivan, chief executive officer of NEMT. “We want to be good neighbors and good corporate citizens, but beyond that, we truly feel it is imperative for all members of the health care community to do their part to ensure that every person has health care.”