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Topic: Consider front-end speech recognition to reduce transcription turnaround time, improve documentation quality

HIM Connection, January 29, 2008

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As hospitals begin the arduous transition to electronic health records (EHR), many are striving to find ways to make the process more manageable and less intimidating. For some, the solution has been speech recognition-a process that converts dictation directly into a text-driven electronic medium that is easily transferred to an EHR.

Front-end speech recognition immediately converts speech into text directly on the dictator's computer screen, providing real-time authentication and documentation completion, whereas back-end recognition allows a dictator to provide speech that is converted to text that is sent to an editor (other than the dictator) for corrections.

Deciding between front-end and back-end speech recognition is ultimately an individual hospital's decision, says Peter Durlach, senior vice president of marketing and product strategy for Dictaphone Healthcare Solutions, a division of Nuance Communications in Burlington, MA. "It's up to the customer to decide. It depends on what the pressures are in the specific institution that they're in," he says.

For example, one hospital may want to reduce transcription costs and complete discharge charts in a timely manner, whereas another hospital's goal is to reduce transcription turnaround time or provide more detailed documentation.

Durlach says that front-end recognition works particularly well in areas in which the turnaround time is crucial and there is a high volume of physicians who provide services for others. "The classic cases are radiology and pathology-the diagnostic areas where the physicians provide a service to others physicians, and their product is basically the result of a test or imaging study," says Durlach. Front-end works well because the ordering physician can read the test or study soon after it is conducted, he says.

Front-end also works well in areas in which a hospital may be deploying an EHR. In these cases, front-end speech recognition has been shown to significantly decrease the time required for documentation, increase the quality of the documentation, and improve physician adoption of the EHR system by eliminating data entry via the keyboard.

Editor's note: This topic is adapted from a February 2008 article in Medical Records Briefing. For more information, click here.

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