Will Voice Transcription Software Replace Medical Transcriptionists?

What are the true possibilities of voice transcription software and is it a threat to the career of professionals such as medical transcriptionists? You may well have heard this question being asked by colleagues without having had a clear answer one way or another. In order to understand how such software might impact you, either positively or negatively, it’s a good idea to review the situation and the context in which you work.

One of the key contributions of a medical transcriptionist is in his or her flexibility and adaptability to changing conditions. Medical personnel such as doctors, surgeons and nurses are often busy with not just one thing but also several things at the same time. This is reflected in the way that they dictate their information. They will often use their voice recording machine, whether it is cassette-driven or a digital recorder, as though they were talking to another person. Asking medical personnel to speak in such a way as to be intelligible to software is asking them too much.

Because of this, we still need the human interface when it comes to transcribing this medical information and producing organized information records. Software is not good enough to be able to filter out all the extraneous sounds such as background noise, snippets of somebody else’s conversation, personal conversations because they forgot that they left the recorder in operation, and many other audible interferences. Software is also too basic for the moment to be able to handle certain strong accents or modifications in speech from doctors who are exhausted at the end of a long work shift.

In this sense, medical transcriptionists still have a fair measure of job security. Even if advances are being made in software voice recognition and voice transcription software, they are by no means sufficient to use automated means to transcribe medical information. It is possible for members of medical staff to use voice recognition software that might effectively bypass the medical transcriptionist, but only if they are prepared to work at it. This is the case where somebody invests the time and effort to “train” voice recognition software to recognize all the words that are being spoken.

It’s still something of a dream to think that doctors will be able to speak their information and automatically generate perfect medical records. Even today, when you speak into voice recognition software, you need to literally pronounce all of the punctuation such as commas, periods, new paragraphs and so on. And because software is still at a very basic level of intelligence, even though great efforts are made to “understand” instead of just transcribing, there will invariably be errors in the information records that are produced.

This means that doctors and medical staff would need to thoroughly proof read medical information records produced automatically by software. There are a number of strict regulations about the quality of medical records, and this quality cannot today be obtained by using software alone. On the other hand, medical transcriptionists may well be able to use voice transcription software to speed up transcription and to handle some of the chores so as to free up time for more interesting and value added activity.