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