How Voice Technology Improves the EHR Experience

Over the last several years, great innovators have found ways to improve efficiency in a variety of different settings by using voice technology. Writers can write articles without using a keyboard, on-the-go workers can dictate their emails, and a lot of tools we use every day—from cars to security systems—can be controlled to some extent via voice technology.

Healthcare is not immune to the delights of voice technology. Most doctors, specialists in particular, prefer to dictate their notes because it’s much faster than typing or taking notes by hand. Now, with the rapid growth of electronic health records (EHR) software, speech recognition software has grown and improved significantly as well. Traditional point-and-click EHRs have never been popular among doctors, but EHRs that incorporate as much voice technology as possible are much more attractive to doctors.

According to a recent KLAS study, the speech recognition market in the healthcare sphere has grown tremendously over the past few years because doctors don’t want to document their notes by pointing, clicking, and typing. The most popular speech recognition solutions are the ones that save time and cut transcription costs, in addition to being highly accurate.

Speech recognition has not only grown in popularity but it has also improved in functionality. Today, speech recognition in an EHR does more than just replace transcription. Doctors can use it to command and control their way through a note (a huge time saver), and dictated information automatically sorts into the appropriate data fields (another big time saver). The next few years will tell us a lot about what types of software doctors use to cover their vast documentation needs, but voice technology is on its way to becoming the standard tool used in most medical practices.