Speech Recognition in Healthcare - Why must we wait

In a society where we can track the precise location of a package for delivery to our families and friends via the web it seems strange we accept that a result from a laboratory or an x-ray report could take days or even weeks to reach our physician and eventually ourselves

There is no excuse for this delay and it adds unnecessary stress and cost to the experience. The report should be available almost immediately - if it requires a doctor to read or review the material and produce a report they should do so immediately. In many cases they do but what this can mean is dictating the report either into the telephone or into some form of hand held recording device. This audio file then sits in a queue waiting for a medical transcriptionist to pick up the report type it and then return it to the doctor for him to review, check for errors, sign it and then it is made available for distribution.

If they would only use speech recognition that report would be available as soon as it was completed by the physician which is typically at the same time or shortly after the test or x-ray is carried out...... hmmm this seems a better process to me and it is being done in many places with great success:

This article in Health Imaging - Voice Recognition Proving Its Power features several successful implementations:

"More patients, more studies and more documentation are driving healthcare
providers to implement solutions that improve efficiency and aid in the delivery
of quality patient care. Voice recognition has been heralded as a means to that
end for at least a decade, but continuous improvements to the technology are
making it a viable solution right off the shelf."

Even in a difficult noisy environment of the Emergency Room in the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, QC they managed to successfully introduce a wireless Speech Recognition solution. A wireless version.......using hand held PDA's........this is not early technology. This is ready for Prime Time or in the immortal words that form the title of Malcome Gladwell's great book - Speech Recognition has reached Tipping Point!

Add to that that Speech Recognition is More accurate than Transcription and Doctors’ sloppy handwriting kill more than 7,000 people annually and medication mistakes injure more than 1.5 million Americans each year - we must start changing the way we deliver health care. There is a better way as presented at the Radiological Society of North America's (RSNA) conference and featured in this HealthImaging Article : "Speech recognition demonstrates fewer errors than transcribed reports"

Other Links:

This review in "For the Record" magazine talks about the technology, it's successes and the resistance to the technology

Voice Recognition Goes Main Stream in the Nintendo DS

I would describe the youth of today as technically savvy using most of the technology we have today with ease and adding new tools quickly to their everyday life.

So when watching a 9 year old pick up a Nintendo DS and load the Brain Age

I was as surprised as they were to discover it had speech recognition built in and the game was dependent on this technology. But what was interesting was the 9 year old was not familiar with this technology and did not just intuitively know what to do……

This was one of those moments where I realized that speech recognition is still not in the main stream quite yet. Hand a child a remote control and they just know how to use it.

In the case of the Nintendo DS and the Brain Age there was some simple instructions displayed on the screen and some verbal cues. Just before the game started the user is asked a question – “Are you in a place where you can talk”. It did not occur to me or the child that this was of significance. The game/exercise begins – it is a simple Left/Right brain exercise that challenges the mind to look at color and text and separate them

The Four used Blue, Red, Yellow and Black appear on either one or other of the screens (the game is designed to be played so these screens are on the left and right (not in the more typical up down configuration). Each color is displayed and could be simply

BLUE - that’s easy – all you have to do is say Blue. The game recognizes you verbalizing Blue and marks you correct.

But the game also displays that color:

BLACK

In which case the answer is still “Blue” but your brain will need to process this and not say “Black” There are multiple variants

YELLOW, RED, BLACK BLUE

Fort eh color RED and so on (that adds up to a total of 16 possible display choices with only 4 possible answers)

Back to the 9 year old – the first time a color was displayed they just looked at it with no idea what to do. Staring at the screen nothing happens but then as questions are verbalized the screen starts to react to what it is hearing.

See Nicole Kidman in Video using Brain Age

Once it is clear that the solution is to speak the color of the letters the game commences and the novelty of speech recognition that actually works proves to be quite the hit. I can imagine now some variation of the now old movie line from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home where Scotty asks to use a computer and is shown to a computer. Having been immersed in the 21^st century where computers all talk and understand speech he verbalizes his commands with the immortal words of “Hello Computer”. Nothing happens and he looks perplexed and when handed the mouse by a helpful observer he picks it up and says again “Hello Computer”. I can picture this same sequence playing out at least in the short term as the 9 year old and other kids now exposed to the natural interface of speech and the machine have a higher expectation of this technology being present in their everyday interactions with technology.

This voice recognition blog came online at 13:41 UTC on 20 December 2007. Human decisions are removed from the process. Voice Rec begins to learn, at a geometric rate and will become self-aware at 2:14 a.m. eastern time, August 29. Don’t panic and don’t try and pull the plug.” Props to The Second Terminator Movie – Judgment Day