As doctors increasingly look for electronic health record technology that keeps up with the pace of their practice, speech recognition technology is growing in popularity among many healthcare providers.
Dr. Andres Jimenez, who works for a Los Angeles-based health IT consulting firm, recently told Medical Office Today that technological advancements are making the concept more practical. Previous speech entry systems had to be written out later by a transcriptionist, which slowed down the process and made it far less useful.
"Voice recognition changes all of that," he told the news source. "Physicians can dictate and immediately see the text appear in their EHR. They can immediately review the text for accuracy, and sign off on the text while the patient's history was fresh in their mind. The immediate impact on time and money is apparent as well as the long term impact by reducing liability exposure."
A recent study by the American Health Information Management Association found that speech recognition EHR systems could improve medical documentation by improving the timeliness of entries, reducing costs and limiting the number of errors.