Impact of Voice Recognition Software on Medical Transcriptions

Voice Recognition! This is the software of the future for medical industry. This software has been able to successfully synchronize with medical transcription.

Today, we will be focusing on how speech recognition software has become so popular, and mainstream that even the medical industry has made a point to make speech recognition a part of their everyday business. We all remember the days when we went to the hospital and received our prescriptions, written by a doctor, on a piece of paper.  It is safe to say that since then a lot has changed in the software business and it’s making its way into the medical industry. Before stepping into the depth of this discussion, let’s first focus our attention to two abbreviations, that have already caught on, and are sure to make quite a splash in the world of electronic records:

• EMR (Electronic Medical Records) – In simple terms, these patient records are entered into a computer rather than being on paper. Patient information like patients’ past medical history, illnesses, medical test results and treatments provided by the medical practitioner. This data is gathered by qualified individuals, who belong to the healthcare field.
• EHR (Electronic Health Records) – This does pretty much the same tasks as EMR, but the difference is that these records are distributed to a certain healthcare organization that initially collects the data. This system is quite impressive, since the information is split and sent to the respective healthcare providers. The best thing about this is that, if a patient has more than one medical practitioner, it will appear in the system, and all those records can be accessed by multiple healthcare organizations.

Imagine that you’re a medical practitioner searching for a patient’s hand written records, while the patient is in a critical medical situation. It will greatly affect the well being of that patient. If EHR was implemented doctors and other medical practitioners will have all the information they need at arm’s length! Although the benefits of this are quite high the most important fact is that it can help save lives!

Now that we’ve discussed the basic impact, we can move on to why this software is proving to be so important to medical practitioners. Well, we came up with the following results:

• Information on the EHR can provide doctors with the tools they need to treat a patient, that might be suffering from a life threatening ailment and can immediately start the treatment.
• EHR is also useful to patients. You can look at your medical records and keep a track of their medical history. You can then see the progress of your health whenever you want to!
• Simplicity in deciding/checking the admission and discharge dates of the patient. If the patient has to be transferred from one location to the next, well, guess what?! This system will make sure that you are transferred with no delay!

Importance of EHR is one thing, but how will the relationship between medical transcriptions and EHR affect the general standing of the healthcare field. Well, here are some points we thought might shed some light on the subject:

• Medical practitioners need not scripting patient information. Dictation options are available, which can record the required information of the patient. Once this document is transcribed, it can be returned to EHR’s of the medical practitioner.
• Companies, that focus solely on transcription, can make use of separate Reportable Transcription software to transfer the information directly into specific fields of EHR.
• If the interaction between the patient and the medical practitioner can be preserved, then medical practitioners will be able to use the EHR system more productively.
• Creating a summary of medical reports is something that voice recognition can offer to medical practitioners. The file can then be listened to by the transcriptionists and makes the necessary changes.
• No software is perfect! That’s something that we can all agree on. There will most likely be errors made by the voice recognition software. This is where the medical transcriptionists step in. They will edit the documents and create the final ones.  

So there you have it! Voice recognition coupled with EHR is well on its way to becoming the software of the future! Well… it’s already here, but as we know, with all software there is always room for improvement!

What do you think of our blog? Would you like to see any blogs about what interests you in the intriguing world of Speech/Voice Recognition? Well, here’s your chance! Send us your suggestions and we’ll do our best to put up something just for you!