Medical technology company integrates speech recognition into EHR software

Greenway Medical Technologies recently announced it has incorporated speech recognition capabilities into its electronic health record software.

According to Greenway, the speech recognition application converts dictated text into XML-based content in real time.

Previously, doctors and other medical professionals had to rely on transcribed text that was scanned into patient records in an unstructured block. But with the new capability, they can dictate medical reports into clinical templates, create searchable and structured patient documents, conduct immediate reviews of spoken content for editing and approval and access a built-in medical dictionary, spell-check and speech-correction tool.

Speech recognition technology, such as that offered by American Dictation, can eliminate the need for costly transcriptions and make patient data more accessible.

“At the end of the day, the holy grail of healthcare is usability,” Justin Barnes, Greenway’s vice president of marketing, corporate development and government affairs, recently told eWeek. “You want to ensure that you’re building the best electronic health record that’s highly functional and usable at the point of care.”

Greenway isn’t the only company integrating speech recognition into its software. IBM and Nuance Communications, maker of Dragon speech software, recently announced a partnership to integrate the capability into the structure fields of electronic health records.