Friday, October 17, 2008

Voice Recognition And Medical Transcription

Voice Recognition has revolutionized the health care industry in recent times. Many experts felt that EMR & Voice Recognition would totally replace Medical Transcription - however; the industry soon realized that transcription has certain advantage.

Transcriptions have been around for years for documenting patient encounters. A medical provider dictates the medical note into a phone or a recording device. The transcriptionist receives the dictation and transcribes it. It may be reviewed by the supervisor for checking errors. The final computerized file is then either emailed directly to the health care provider or the file is transferred to a website and is later downloaded by the provider. Each method has its pros and cons. Point and Click Templates .

Speech recognition technology has been threatening to eliminate the need for traditional medical transcription for quite some time. However, the reality of the situation is that, while voice recognition technology certainly has grown in importance in the health care industry, it is no where near being capable of replacing a traditional medical transcriptionist. Home medical transcription jobs are as plentiful as ever and the future of medical transcription is extremely bright. Typically, speech recognition software will be capable of producing an output that is maybe 60% to 80% correct.

Most of the physicians will indeed no longer depend on a transcriptionist to issue reports and clinical notes. That is particularly true for departments like ER, where front-end speech recognition allows physicians to issue and correct reports as they dictate, thereby releasing medical documentation prior to the patient being discharged. That is also true for Radiology, where large volume of standard reports (i.e.: normal findings) are typically processed.

At this time there is no voice recognition software which can handle this type of voice recognition. It is impossible for the software to determine actual speech from mistakes in conversation, background noise, heavy accents, etc.

Can voice recognition ever replace transcriptionists?

Sure it can.

If a doctor is willing to sit down and take the sufficient time to train his voice recognition software to recognize his voice and speech patterns (this takes time and is not done automatically), yes it is possible.

If the doctor thereafter dictates very clearly, using proper punctuation in his speech (stopping for periods, pausing for commas) without any background noise or interruptions. Yes, it is possible.

Sophisticated technology is certainly bringing efficiency to the industry, but the need for quality home medical transcriptionists and medical record editors will live on and continue to grow well into the future. In fact there has never been a more opportune time to enter this exciting career field.


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