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Advances in medicine are normally heralded for their ability to cure or manage a disease or allow for less invasive procedures. But steps forward are also being made behind the scenes  one area being medical records.

As more physicians and medical facilities move toward electronic rather than paper medical records, systems to streamline that process are evolving as well. Speech recognition technology can now save time and money by cutting out the medical transcription middleman. Dr. Andrew Fireman, a cardiologist on staff at Abington Memorial Hospital, is a believer in the new technology. His practice, Abington Medical Specialists, which has 24 medical providers, is 99.8 percent paperless, he said in a recent interview. About two years ago the practice went to electronic record keeping and implemented Dragon Medical’s voice recognition software at the same time, he said.

The physician speaks into a microphone and the speech recognition technology  computer software  turns that into text that goes directly into the electronic health record. While voice recognition only contributes part of the medical record, it saves money  “We were probably spending $170,000 to $200,000 in transcription postage and paper costs [per year], which went to zero,” Fireman said. There is the one-time outlay for the software and costs to fax things out of the electronic system, but “we don’t use the postal service anymore,” he added. The time saving feature is not in recording the data but in not having to wait a couple of days for the data to be transcribed and sent back through the mail.

Using electronic records doesn’t save a physician time  an electronic record takes longer to document, he said; the advantage is “because an electronic record is a more complete record and immediately available, it is a huge jump. There is currently a financial incentive to switch to electronic medical records “and soon there will be a financial disincentive if you don’t use it,” Fireman said. “Electronic medical records are finally at the point where they are much better,” he said. The limitation of voice recognition is accuracy, but those systems are more accurate now, too, he said. What it boils down to is a computer taking over a person’s job, Fireman said.

Source: Montgomery Media

You can discuss more about Speech Recognition and related topics in our Speech Recognition Group.