by
Keith Loria, Reporter | February 19, 2011
From the January/February 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
“Speech recognition gives time back to physicians that they would otherwise spend on more manual documentation,” Belton says. “Increased productivity leads to cost savings, with more time to focus on patient care.”
Once physicians learn how to easily dictate straight into the EHR and have essential information automatically extracted while at the same time meeting meaningful use criteria, adoption could be swift.
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The biggest challenge, Spring says, is balancing the need to populate EHRs with complete and accurate information while giving providers documentation methods that do not limit their productivity and ability to focus on patient care.
Ease of use
Installing an EHR system in a hospital is the easy part. The performance of an EHR system—improving “ease of use” for providers and gathering meaningful data—is much more complex.
“Every day, doctors tell us that dictation is their preferred method of documentation because it adds color and meaning to the patient record,” says Spring. “When it comes to complete and accurate patient information, their voice is incredibly valuable. It’s important for us to develop products that not only convert their voice to useful information, but support a provider’s workflow so that it’s easy for them to create high-quality documentation, and also work seamlessly with the EHR.”
Technology is moving at lightning speed, especially in the mobile health area. With the ease of Web-based solutions that are affordable, user-friendly and improve productivity, physician receptivity is increasing. “Couple this with the 16,000 annual medical school graduates who are encouraged from day one to use technology in the classroom, as well as during their clinical training, and physician attitudes toward technology are no longer a barrier to progression, but rather the vehicle for it,” says Ruthann Russo, managing director and a documentation specialist with Navigant Consulting.
Early speech recognition software was known for problems centered around its inability to extract appropriate information from unstructured text. Through the advent of natural language processing, great strides have been made to automate the dictation process through speech recognition. This allows for needed patient information to be extracted from freely dictated text directly into the appropriate EHR data fields in an accurate and efficient manner.
“Creating software that’s more user-friendly is accomplished by understanding exactly how it’s going to be used in real life. You have to build tools that make the process simple and easy for the end users,” Spring says. “If an older physician is used to dictating, platforms that incorporate speech recognition allow them to continue to dictate, while the technology transforms their voice into useful information for the EHR.”
