Medical transcription has been a part of many hospitals and private practices for a number of years. The doctor speaks into a recording device and then that recording is sent to a transcription specialist where it can be typed out and turned into a document. This has become a common procedure because doctors often find it easier to simply talk through thoughts or examinations as opposed to actually stopping and writing the information. With the emergence of electronic health records and the digitization of many aspects of medical recording an alternative to personal transcription has been developed.
Medical dictation software allows a doctor to speak into a microphone and have those words interpreted by a speech recognition program. This application can then paste words into a document as the physician is speaking. The original hope was that this type of technology could be refined to completely remove the need for separate transcription services. The reality, however, is much more complex. Medical transcription software can help a doctor to digitize a large portion of a spoken statement. The software is not always perfect and does run across words that are unidentifiable. In these cases some programs require the speaker to select the word in question from a list of options. This breaks the flow of speaking naturally.
Medical dictation software is very specific about how speech is interpreted. It cannot be relied upon to make an accurate transcription. This prevents the technology from being used to directly input data into an electronic health record. A large problem with the software is the array of medical terms, the common mispronunciations of those terms and the complex syntactic programming that is required to detect when these words should be used. Despite the addition of learning technologies to the software there is still no medical dictation program that can fully replace a human being performing the same task.
The resulting output from a medical dictation program must usually be edited by the speaker or by a transcription service. This is because punctuation, homonyms and other problems will need to be corrected in order to make the text readable. Medical dictation software can be a time saver when it is used correctly. It saves a transcription service from having to input every word that was spoken. It can also be used by doctors to quickly make notes that can be expanded on and edited later. Medical dictation software saves time but does not completely remove the need for some type of human transcription.
Medical dictation software allows a doctor to speak into a microphone and have those words interpreted by a speech recognition program. This application can then paste words into a document as the physician is speaking. The original hope was that this type of technology could be refined to completely remove the need for separate transcription services. The reality, however, is much more complex. Medical transcription software can help a doctor to digitize a large portion of a spoken statement. The software is not always perfect and does run across words that are unidentifiable. In these cases some programs require the speaker to select the word in question from a list of options. This breaks the flow of speaking naturally.
Medical dictation software is very specific about how speech is interpreted. It cannot be relied upon to make an accurate transcription. This prevents the technology from being used to directly input data into an electronic health record. A large problem with the software is the array of medical terms, the common mispronunciations of those terms and the complex syntactic programming that is required to detect when these words should be used. Despite the addition of learning technologies to the software there is still no medical dictation program that can fully replace a human being performing the same task.
The resulting output from a medical dictation program must usually be edited by the speaker or by a transcription service. This is because punctuation, homonyms and other problems will need to be corrected in order to make the text readable. Medical dictation software can be a time saver when it is used correctly. It saves a transcription service from having to input every word that was spoken. It can also be used by doctors to quickly make notes that can be expanded on and edited later. Medical dictation software saves time but does not completely remove the need for some type of human transcription.
RSS Feed