9 Of 10 Hospitals Plan Expanded Speech Recognition Programs

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

A KLAS survey reveals 9 of 10 hospitals plan to expand the use of front-end speech deployment.

Speech recognition technology has been called an “aggressively” growing market by HIMSS, and already has shown a growth rate of more than 20 percent per year, as Health IT Outcomes reported in October.

“The data is pretty consistent that providers spend upwards of 50 percent of their day doing things around documentation and data,” says Maureen Ladouceur, VP of Clinical Operations for VoiceFirst by Honeywell. “We will see more and more dominance with regard to voice. Voice will leapfrog keystroke-based applications over the next three to five years. That will become one of the primary preferences amongst providers.”

In the recent KLAS survey,  Front-End Speech 2014: Functionality Doesn’t Trump Physician Resistance, researchers found 50 percent of providers said skeptical clinicians were the number one barrier to their adoption of more speech recognition technology.

“Physicians are resistant to changes in their workflow,” says report author Boyd Stewart in a press release. “While hospital leadership sees the value of FES, many end users are frustrated that they are now being asked to do the work of transcriptionists.”

Despite the fact that half of these providers said physician resistance to change was a factor, they also found 90 percent of providers plan to expand the use of speech recognition. Healthcare IT News writes the ROI providers see after implementing such software has a strong effect on their decisions to expand.

“Facilities interviewed saw a higher impact in nearly every category measured in the study, including reduced transcription costs, reduced documentation time and more complete patient-narratives,” with speech recognition software says KLAS.