Speech Recognition Systems in Healthcare

In this article we take a look at just a couple of the pros and cons of speech recognition systems in healthcare.

This well known piece of technology in the healthcare sector is used by many and most have heard of it. It gives doctors and other medical professionals the ability to quickly capture patient information and convert it into a digital format. That digital format can then be filed electronically in almost any EHR system.

Thanks to speech recognition systems, it is possible for many, if not most doctors to boost productivity.

The PROS and CONS of Speech Recognition Systems in Healthcare

Any new technological advances, especially in the sensitive health care sector brings several benefits. But with these benefits there are bound to be some challenges.

Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of speech recognition in the health care sector today.

PROS:

Some of the core advantages of using this technology in the health care sector includes the following:

Less Paperwork:

This is one of the key benefits of using voice recognition technology. As a matter of fact, it effectively allows many physicians to be able to reduce a large amount of their paperwork. Once they have a recording system that they can rely on, many doctors can easily avoid writing or for that matter, typing tedious patient records, such as diagnosis as well as treatment notes.

Save Time:

There are few people in the world who can write faster than they can talk and it is here that speech recognition technology really shines. Instead of spending their time making endless reports regarding the diagnosis of their patents, doctors can utilize that time more constructively by dictating their reports.

Improve Workflow:

An increasingly large number of doctors today are seeing that speech recognition is able to enhance their overall workflows. This is because speech recognition solutions typically provide an automatic queuing of dictations. From multiple users to their own predefined assistants, it allows for the selective routing of various dictation files.

Beyond that, many systems are trained to recognize not just their own users, but also their accents, as well as previous corrections too. This way they are able to effectively “learn” multiple common speech patterns in their own right.

CONS:

Some of the disadvantages of using speech recognition technology in health care includes the following:

Ambient Noise:

This is one of the biggest challenges that speech recognition technology has to face. Since hospitals and other health care facilities are intrinsically noisy places. It is very challenging for the software to separate the users speech from the ambient noise. This can lead to errors as the speech often gets garbed during the process. But, with the use of a high quality speech recognition microphone you can easily overcome this.

User Accents:

The software is very accent sensitive and training it to recognize a particular voice or accent is not an easy task. Fortunately, this technology has improved significantly over the years and is getting better at understanding accents.