Computer systems capable of understanding human speech have become part of the fabric of our everyday life. People routinely speak to disembodied electronic assistants, such as when calling a customer help line or to check the balance on an account.
We also speak to our smartphones, using them to look up information or to dictate a note. With robust speech recognition in place, we can get our jobs done faster and with fewer errors, leaving us free to devote more time to our core responsibilities.
With the development of increasingly sophisticated computer and software solutions, medical practices often use voice dictation systems such as Dragon Medical™ for producing and transcribing reports on patients. If you are new to using speech recognition in the workplace, you should know that voice-to-text data entry during report transcribing can truly revolutionize your practice.
Financial Benefits
If your practice is still relying on an outside service to handle transcribing the reports dictated by your medical staff, you are at a disadvantage when compared to savvier organizations that have embraced speech recognition technology.
You should consult with your accounting department to verify that you are spending much more on human transcriptionists than you would pay for the latest in voice-to-text solutions.
Macros Boost Efficiency
Macros are commonly used in word processing applications and other software solutions where efficiency is of prime concern.
Good voice recognition systems will allow users to create macros for different scenarios, eliminating the need for your team members to dictate entire reports, word for word every time.
There are so many commonly used sections of text to describe various conditions, situations, diagnoses, and treatment protocols that it would be a shame to waste time typing them over and over into reports, let alone making your staffers say them aloud each time when using voice recognition.
Excellent systems will include a utility that is sufficiently intelligent to automatically insert dictated data directly into the patient’s EHR profile. Doing so populates the correct fields as the report is being transcribed.
Systems with this capability eliminate the time-consuming double-work that medical practices typically needed to devote to finishing their reports, as they previously would have to go back and manually input that data into the patient’s record.
It’s clear that adopting a “killing two birds with one stone” approach to creating reports and entering data simultaneously provides for great efficiency in one pass.
If your practice is ready to make the leap into affordable and much more efficient report making, you will want to work with a software provider that has a proven track record of helping medical organizations implement the latest in voice-to-text technology. You’ll save money that would otherwise be earmarked for third party transcription services and will no longer need to wait for the work to be done by people and delivered back to your facility as properly formatted text.
Key Takeaway
- You can free your medical professionals from some of the drudgery of their job by implementing voice-to-text data entry.
- Improve your bottom line by using speech recognition in-house instead of sending recordings of your physicians out to a third-party transcriptionist service.
- Not only will you save money on transcription, your reports will be generated and available to the rest of the staff in no time since you don’t have to wait for them to come back from a service.
- A good system will let your users set up macros to account for different scenarios during dictation.
- Better systems enable you to automatically insert dictated data straight into the patient’s EHR profile.
- Your organization can “kill two birds with one stone” by making reports at the same time as you enter the patient data.
