According to a Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society report, the increasing use of speech recognition software and dictation systems is changing the face of healthcare. An article in InformationWeek based on the HIMSS report says that the growing adoption rates along with speech recognition’s comparatively low market penetration rate suggest that there is great growth potential for these technologies.
With the adoption of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, healthcare providers are finding it difficult to meet their practice goals as EHR, contrary to expectations, reduces productivity. Healthcare providers are finding it difficult to deal with their structured templates especially because a lot of clinical data is unstructured.
According to a report based on a recent survey, many physicians say they are unhappy with the EHR products available to them, possibly because EHRs are still in an early stage of development. They describe them as “clunky, confusing and complex”, and they finding it very difficult to incorporate EHRs into their workflow in a smooth manner. In fact, about one-third of all physicians surveyed in an American EHR Partners study said that they were very dissatisfied with their EHR and that they were finding it very difficult to get back to pre-EHR productivity levels.
These factors are encouraging healthcare providers to adopt speech recognition and dictation technology to deal with the complexity of managing EHRs. These natural language processing tools makes unstructured data accessible and make new data sets available to physicians. Dictation devices are easy to use. Medical transcription companies offer speech recognition software and QA of the output transcripts to healthcare providers. The medical transcription company then QA’s the report and transcribes them accurately and in custom turnaround time.
HIMSS data shows that the adoption rate of speech recognition software rose from 21% to 47% during 2009 to 2013. It would rise even further if vendors could convince the physicians about its accuracy and time saving capabilities.
