Speech Recognition and your EHR

Electronic medical records (EMR) have become the norm in healthcare organizations. Referring to the individual patient's records, these documents are normally found and stored in servers and easily accessed on computers.

While sometimes costly to implement, and requiring an adjustment period by users, EHR's oftentimes increase productivity and reduce patient errors.


According to Value MD, EMRs can include medical histories, demographics, allergy lists, billing records, lab tests and so on. With a properly organized system, healthcare professionals - doctors, nurses and even front desk staffs - can easily access patient information from a tablet, laptop or desktop computer and with the changing tides in technology, handheld devices as well.

Speech recognition software, predominantly Dragon Medical, makes the task of uploading data faster and more convenient, making it an important addition to any medical system. Doctors, for example, can use recording devices to dictate patient diagnosis and treatment. The audio stream can then be transcribed into text, which becomes a part of the EMR for that patient.

Many providers prefer to dictate directly into the EHR, using an handheld audio input device such as Nuance's PowerMic II.  This allows the physician to directly fill out the data fields in real time, saving time and money.


At the same time, speech recognition software can make searching for documents faster.  You can use simple voice commands to search your computer for documents, open patient records, search online medical publications such as PubMed and WebMd.  Almost any computer function can be controlled using only your voice.

As Apple's products continue to make inroads to the medical field, providers will be happy to learn that they are not left out in the cold.  MacSpeech Medical, offers some of the same features of Dragon Medical, albeit less developed than it's PC based counterpart.  For direct dictation into a Mac based EMR, however, MacSpeech Medical fits the bill nicely.

One of the most common question that we get is "Is Dragon Medical compatible with my EMR?"  While not all Electronic Medical record software developers have submitted their product for testing, Dragon essentially works with any Windows based application.  In some instances, where Dragon identifies a particular EMR's data fields as a "nonstandard window" Nuance was good enough to provide a simple workaround, namely the dictation box.

The dictation box is a native word processing window that will appear on command, and allow the user to dictate, and edit their documentation, then transfer the corrected text to the user's desired EMR data field.