Each year, there are slightly more than 860 million visits to doctors’ offices. Many of these visits are routine checkups for children and adults. Yet, every visit means new information about patients that doctors must record in some fashion.
The vast majority of that information goes into a chart or patient file. For a long time, doctors recorded this information into recorders and sent them out to transcription services (find the best transcription company here).
What is Medical Transcription Software?
Medical transcription software is a specialized kind of speech recognition software. In one sense, it operates like any speech recognition software. It takes the speech it hears and converts it into text.
What makes medical transcription software different is that it often comes loaded with a glossary of medical terms. This helps the machine recognize and convert terms that you might normally need to train into a speech recognition program.
How Does It Work?
An MTS program typically works in one of two ways. Some systems let the doctor or a nurse provide the voice input and give back the transcript immediately for approval.
Other systems add extra layers of review. These systems record and transcribe audio, then provide both to a transcriptionist for a first-round review. If the transcriptionist approves the text as accurate, it then goes back to the doctor or nurse for a final approval.
Benefits
Medical transcription and related administrative tasks often consume a huge chunk of a physician’s day. That is time they cannot spend with patients. Medical voice recognition software can speed up the process by eliminating steps in the process.
That frees up more time for doctors to spend with patients.
Speaking their notes directly into the system can allow for a more organic thought process and prompt insights into a patient’s case or condition. It also lets doctors summarize complicated patient histories in a more direct fashion that helps anyone looking at the file in the future.
Limits
While speech recognition has come a long way, it often still struggles with foreign or even regional accents. That can create problems with creating an accurate transcription.
While most systems can learn a specific person’s accent, the process can take some time. You may lose the efficiency gained through software transcription in review and correction.
Transcription Software and You
All medical practices must deal with the need for transcriptions, particularly as electronic health records become the norm and demand more information. Unfortunately, these transcriptions often soak up physician time and severely limit the number of patients they can see in a week.
Transcription software offers a possible solution to this problem. Ideally, the software can reduce the amount of time doctors spend dealing with transcriptions and related admin tasks.
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