Increasing Useage in Medical Transcription by Transcend (TRCR)

Transcend Services inc (NASDAQ: TRCR), a leader medical transcription services in the U.S. healthcare market announced results year end December 31, 2007 with a significant increase which included an increase from 20% to 24% of editing done using speech recognition tools

Approximately 24% of the Company's total production volume was edited using speech recognition technology in the fourth quarter, compared to 20% in the fourth quarter of 2006. The Company's goal is to grow this percentage to 40% over the next two years, assuming the mix of work on BeyondTXT versus other platforms stays relatively constant. In addition, the Company processed approximately 15% of total volume offshore during the fourth quarter, compared to 7% in the fourth quarter of 2006. Offshore volume as a percentage of total volume is expected to grow gradually over the next several years. We do not expect the growth in offshore volume to impact our domestic workforce.

See more here

ER Docs Embrace Speech Recognition

More physicians moving towards speech recognition - and in a challenging speech recognition environment

Christopher Obetz, M.D., an emergency medicine physician at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, has been using speech recognition software for two years and likes the faster turnaround time and cost savings. "I'm able to complete my charts and consult other physicians about patients in real time," he says. "In the past, you might not see dictated notes for six to 12 hours, but now it's instantly accessible."

Read more here

Speech Recognition to the Rescue for a Busy Medical Group

As the article says

Physicians don’t want to keyboard

Add to that the crippling nature of costs associated with transcription and he long lag times and you have a problem that Speech recognition is well suited to fixing

So at the Camino Medical Group in Mountain View, Calif:

Today we have nearly 300 doctors across the South Bay Area self-completing 6,500 reports each week. We have reduced more than $2 million in annual transcription expenses by eliminating outside transcription of dictated reports. Of equal importance, we have created a way to migrate other physicians who were still handwriting reports to an electronic format without incurring costs.

We do still have a few physicians handwriting reports, however we have already gotten very close to our goal of 100 percent of physicians using dictation with speech recognition and 70 percent using the self-editing functionality. We estimated that without speech recognition, converting all of our handwritten reports to traditional dictation-transcription would cost more than $4 million.

You can read the article in Healthcare Informatics

Cutting Time for Physicians with Speech Recognition

Cutting Time for Physicians with Speech Recognition

In a busy Orthopedic surgeons practice in Detroit MI an orthopedic surgeon is using Speech recognition to help him document and communicate all the information he gathers on his patients - 60 in a busy day in his office.

Paperwork for this took hours to complete and included all the forms required for billing/insurance as well as prescriptions and referral letters and his own notes. Like many he used to use dictation and Medical Transcription that not only cost him money but cost him and his patient's time - in many cases days.

But now he is using gloStream gloEMR electronic medical record solution featuring clinical decision tools, document management optimized for clinical workflow and built in speech recognition technology.

In this model gloStream is aiming to replace the costly transcription that small doctors offices pay for each month with a monthly fee for access to their system which will allow them to document and provide all the tools necessary for managing patients, documents, laboratory tests etc and loose the transcription requirement by integrating Speech Recognition into the application all for $1,000

Doctors like Nallamothu gave it high marks, citing in particular its voice-recognition tool.

No details on what speech recongtion solution is powering this applciation but it uses "a Microsoft Vista platform"

You can read more about it here: HEALTH: Voice-recognition device cuts time for physicians

Not Everyone Wants Speech Recognition - Gethuman.com

David Hull @ "Field Notes on the Web" is not fully taken with Speech Recognition and he does have a point

...I'm not sure speech is going to take over as completely as one might think. Why do people send text with cell phones? One would be hard-pressed to imagine a more tortuous way of producing text than to thumb it in on a tiny numeric pad, especially before word recognition, but people did, and do, even when they could call, or leave a voice mail.

He's right - Texting was the new way to communicate seasonal greetings this year:

About 65 million texts were sent through O2 on Christmas Day...
The three largest mobile phone service providers in the country said more than 62 million messages were sent on December 24 and 25 - five million more than in 2006.
Swisscom counted more than 25 million electronic messages on its network, with a little over half sent on Christmas Eve.....
One billion text messages are sent every week in the UK....
The Mobile Data Association (MDA) today announced that 4,825 billion messages were sent during September 2007, an average of over 1.2 billion messages every week, staggeringly, the same number of messages sent during the whole of 1999

Anyway - I digress. Speech Recognition is not going to replace all other forms of data capture with technology but it is going to become more pervasive. There are lots of reasons why you might not want to use speech to interact with technology:

Personally I would prefer not to talk to my computer much of the time, either because the environment is noisy (playing havoc with accuracy), or because it's quiet (and I don't want to disturb anyone), or because there's someone else in the room I might like to talk to without confusing the UI.

In short, speech recognition is useful now (particularly if typing is difficult or impossible for a person) and will continue to become more useful as the technology continues to improve, but I don't see it taking over the world.

That said it is already in use on many verbal exchanges taking place today. At least one government (with participation from at least another 3 or more) is listening in in the form of Echelon (allegedly) . And we are increasingly being connected to voice recognition systems on the phone. ON on that point - there are times when it works and it is better but many times the system is so poorly designed and treats the customer/individual poorly we all just want to get to a real human being....enter gethuman.com a site that was set up by Paul English. He's a successful entrepreneur - if I remember correctly he described himself as a serial entrepreneur (Boston Light Software and Kayak) and a philanthropist - a real gentleman.

If you get frustrated with the speech systems online check this site out - it provides you with the quickest way to ....... get a human being.

Voice Recognition built in to Bluetooth Devices

BlueAnt and Sensory Partner in Voice Interfaces for Bluetooth Devices

"Bringing intuitive Voice User Interface for the Bluetooth headset market where speech control and a complete hands-free control will dramatically enhance the user experience."

As they say in their press release:

the first ever Bluetooth headset with a true voice user interface (VUI). The BlueGenie Voice Interface software suite enables manufacturers of Bluetooth products to integrate full voice control and synthetic speech output without the need for visual displays or complex user interfacing.

Users of the BlueAnt V1 will no longer deal with lengthy or confusing button pressing to access functionality. Instead, the VI can be controlled with simple phrases like "pair headset," "call home," "volume up" and "accept call." When it comes to checking headset status it will not be necessary to interpret confusing beep sequences or LEDs. BlueGenie's voice synthesis capability enables the V1 to speak back to the consumer, letting them know device settings including successful pairing of the headset, battery power level, etc.

I can't be the only one who can't remember the never ending list of button sequences to program my blue tooth headsets..... this has to be better.

Speech in GPS Navigation Systems - Garmin 880

Speech recognition in a GPS system that really works - check out this video on Gizmodo

...we were impressed with just how good the voice recognition really was. Not only could it hear us over the Vegas traffic and the radio

This included some intelligent speech interpretation

it even parsed out when we said "sixteen hundred" instead of "one six zero zero". Check out what we mean in the video above.

The Garmin range was already streets ahead of the competition and this just makes it even better

Here's the Garmin site video

Voice Recognition for the Police

The Australians are taking voice recognition and technology to new heights. They have created a High Tech car that includes Voice Recognition to allow the officer to keep their hands on the wheel

More information here on the Holden VE Commodore

that might make James Bond feel spoiled for choice

The speech recognition is for safety:

The Holden unit contains voice recognition software that let officers keep their hands in place on the wheel, as well as cameras that can bean (this is their typo) the action in real-time to communications centers

Cool - as Mike Elgan would say "I want one"

In Car and Motorcycle Recognition

Expect the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) coming up to feature many announcements that relate to speech recognition - Parrot who make several innovative products in the wireless world have come out with two new ones for the show

One for drivers of cars (Parrot RK8200) and the other for motorcyclists (Parrot SK4000)

See the Car unit video at CNET videos here and Engadgets review here
Motorcycle unit can be seen here and

Apart from listening to music it integrates with Blue Tooth mobile phones providing hands-free function including automatic phone book synchronization and hands-free call functionality through voice recognition and voice synthesis (Text-to-Speech) that reads contact names directly to the user.

The software is multi-user eliminating the need to record names and train the system and dials numbers automatically reading the contact names from the user’s phone book through the earpiece and also identifies radio stations to help the rider/driver select a station without taking his or her hands of the handlebar/wheel.

As the video review said.... who needs wants in car stereo with CD's anymore

Speech Recognition Goes Mobile

Even more evidence that Speech Recognition is going mainstream

SMB Advisor Middle East Focus features an article: 13 future mobile technologies that will change the way you work

The list includes: Mobile WiMax, Multihop relay networks, Femtocells and fixed-mobile convergence, Miniscule, less power-hungry mobile chips (who doesn't want that!), Wireless USB and ultrawideband and coming in at No 7

Change 7: Nearly flawless speech recognition

Featured as an important aspect for the increasingly mobile population being fed mobile devices

"Speech recognition got bogged down because it was only 98% or 99% accurate," Burrus said. "Even at that accuracy, many of us found it was faster to type. A lot of the problem had to do with processing power—speech recognition needs a lot of horsepower."

So with the new powerful chips (and probable faster network access to allow thin client style speech recognition actually delivered on the mobile device but the processing power on some server sat on the end of a high speed everywhere wireless connection) we will see

everything you do with your keyboard at your desk, you'll be able to do with speech while you're mobile.

But as they say - what could hold this technology back:

Users could be reticent about letting others in public places hear their business. They may prefer to combine better speech recognition with other methods of input.

Better microphones that allow high quality audio capture in public area with some level of privacy will help - an in case you think that's not possible I am pretty sure the Special forces around the world have microphones that allow them to talk without disturbing anyone around that might want to listen in....!