Voice Recognition An "Aggressively" Growing Market

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

Both speech recognition and virtualization are positioned for growth in the healthcare IT market

Categorized as having potential for “aggressive” growth, both virtualization software and dictation with speech recognition are expected to have a much higher adoption rate than other IT applications in the coming years. According to the HIMSS report, Essentials of the U.S. Hospital IT Market, these applications already have an historical compounded annual growth rate of 20 percent or higher. HIMSS reports these applications will continue on their path of rapid growth due to the fact that less than half of hospitals already use these types of technologies.

“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 in an article for EHR Intelligence. “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.”

“The major challenge we’re going to have is working to help the market understand how our design, development, and deployment of voice differ from things that are more dominant in the market,” Ladouceur continues. “A lot of people are going to have a stereotype in their mind when they hear voice, and it’s going to be our challenge to help people understand how we do it differently and what it means to them.”

Authors of a guest column for Health IT Outcomes write some providers are already onboard despite the sometimes negative stereotype voice recognition software has developed. “Voice recognition allows us as doctors to clearly and thoroughly convey our thoughts and the subtleties of the medical decision making at hand so as to ensure that patient information, in its entirety, is then available for any care hand-offs that will undoubtedly take place.”

The authors continue, “What we are trying to convey is that, depending upon context, say if you’re a doctor, the ability of voice recognition to act as an intelligent, conversational interface between doctor and machine – when lives are on the line – is nothing short of remarkable.”