Generating Medical Records with Voice Recognition

Hospitals in Europe are increasingly deploying electronic medical record (EMR) systems to ensure patient safety and accurate, accessible, and real-time health information. To facilitate this move, hospitals are using voice recognition, according to a new report from Frost & Sullivan (Palo Alto, CA, USA), an international consulting firm.

The use of voice recognition in healthcare management is still an emerging market and is expected to expand. Adopting voice recognition solutions can eliminate the need for in-house transcription staff, resulting in a huge cost reduction. Potential applications include transcription, patient monitoring, interactive response systems, and telemedicine as well as electronic health-record generation, maintenance, and security.

Despite the cost savings and increased efficiency associated with voice-recognition systems, a lack of accuracy, limited vocabulary size, and the need to work from a predefined list of commands and phrases make customer acceptance of these systems a critical challenge. However, while prevailing solutions offer speech-processing accuracy levels of about 96-98%, future applications are expected to reach almost 100% due to innovations such as natural language understanding. Healthcare providers in Europe are under enormous pressure to reduce costs and improve the quality of care provided, and viable voice-recognition technology can reduce by more than 50% the time required to generate reports.

"In the past, although voice-recognition systems were able to recognize dictation, users were still required to correct misspelled words,” said Konstantinos Nikolopoulos, research analyst at Frost & Sullivan. "In contrast to this, developers of this technology are now able to offer systems that can ‘intuitively' select words, as in the case of homophones.”




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