Healthcare transcription and Voice Recognition

Is speech recognition the latest way out for medical transcription needs? Voice recognition software or speech recognition software is one of the new growths in the medical transcription field. It has been hyped as the solution for a health professional’s documentation requirements.

How does it pan out? The doctor is given a digital platform by the voice recognition service provider where the healthcare professional can call in and record his patient notes at the end of the day. The software converts it to typed form, which is made available to the doctor to edit and correct as needed

Seems easy enough. But is it as simple as that? Apparently not! Voice recognition software requires to be evaluated on all the criteria used while deciding upon a hospital’s healthcare transcription company.

Time saved: When medical transcription requirements are subcontracted one of the most important benefits is the time optimization aspect. Time is a valuable commodity for healthcare professionals and they would like to utilize it for delivering excellent care to their patients. But when voice recognition software is used the doctor has to spend more time on it in the following areas:

Preparation time: voice recognition software needs the physician to personally ‘develop’ the software on the speech example, accent, standard terms and an assortment of nuances of his/her speech pattern so that the software can ‘learn’ it and adapt accordingly. This could involve a huge time investment from the healthcare professional utilizing it, which the physician may ill afford to make.

Time for dictation: voice recognition software requires the healthcare professional to change his style of dictation to include punctuations, grammar, spellings, detailed terminology, paragraph and report start and ending etc., as opposed to the free flow form of dictations that the healthcare professionals are used to.

Time for proofreading: Unlike the traditional method of medical transcription where the patient transcripts are subject to rigorous proof reading and quality verifications, here the physician needs to spend significant time editing and correcting before signing off on the reportsrn.
Accuracy: The accuracy levels of the finished reports is of utmost importance as it affects care of the patients at every level as well as forming the basis for all further documentation needs. The accuracy level from voice recognition software is found to be about 60%-65%. That means correcting: and editing the transcripts to make up for the residual 35%-40% correctness.

Costs: The price factor for voice recognition software will fluctuate based on the number of people using and the size of the establishment. It will also have to factor in additional expenses required for correcting the records to an acceptable level. One may find that it is costing more per line than was quoted in the beginning.

Learning curve: When healthcare providers seek out for services for transcribing their patient records they would like to have solutions that are expert and correct from the very first. In the case of voice recognition software there is a definite learning period that affects the correctness of completed reports till the software ‘learns’ to follow a particular healthcare professional’s talking patterns and even then the correctness levels are only 60%-65%.

Flexibility: When new healthcare professionals are added to the health facility the speech recognition software has to be trained further to take on the speech nuances of the new joiners. There is no agility provided by voice recognition software for this.
In conclusion we can positively say that speech recognition software will never be able to absolutely substitute manual medical transcription services. The important aspect to be pondered upon here is that patient records are created of human beings, dictated by human beings and therefore needs another human being to transcribe it. Medical transcriptionists will have a valuable role to play at least as editors and proofreaders.

Medical transcription requires a certain amount of training, subjective judgment and understanding the context to be exact and related, which will not be possible to achieve completely through software, no matter how expertly created.

For the medical transcription requirements of a healthcare facility one should look for a vendor that offers dedication on accuracy, delivery time, logical costing and HIPAA compliance