ALL THAT GLITTERS IS NOT NECESSARILY GOLD; VOICE RECOGNITION MAY BE SHOWN THE DOOR!!
Stress on meaningful EMR usage
A fair percentage of physicians all over the country might have a moderately positive opinion about the usage of voice recognition in getting their dictations transcribed and the transcriber, medical language specialist or the physician later on doing the necessary corrections before it is used for continuous patient care. But the rules of the game have been changed dramatically in the past 2 years with the advent of the HITECH Act and its stress on meaningful EMR usage.
HITECH act would change the game itself
Although the speech recognition solution providers have been doing their best to cope up with the new set of rules, it looks likely that the HITECH act would change the game itself and push voice recognition over the brink. This is because physicians are no longer advised to dictate lengthy descriptive narrations about their patient conditions, but rather fill out brief forms or choose from existing options in an EMR. Most of the physicians have looked upon this as a necessary evil, since the rationale behind such meaningful EMR usage, apart from data mining, is to reduce the occurrence of significant errors found in a MT transcribed medical record; and of course more rampant when done by a voice recognition system.
Unless voice recognition softwares develop artificial intelligence, it seems highly unlikely that physicians would be able to fill out these EMR fields by just speaking into a Dictaphone. Although there are plans on the anvil by major speech recognition firms to beef up their programs by infusing them with so called “Clinical Language Understanding”, it seems highly improbable that such systems will glean the relevant data out of a dictation, and then populate the respective fields in an EMR accurately. So, for all intents and purposes a physician might be much better off having the good old transcriber fill out the forms for him in an EMR.
All that Glitters May Not be Gold
A company which prides itself in the task of EMR posting is iSource Inc., based out of California, which has been providing such services to a vast clientele over a sea of EMRs/EHRs, for more than a decade. It had seen the heyday of speech recognition when some of its own clients had migrated to voice recog platforms, only to return when the HITECH Act got implemented in 2009; and the most common phrase that has been recently doing the rounds at iSource Inc with regards to speech recognition is “All that Glitters May Not be Gold”. iSource can be reached via toll-free at 877-272-1572.