The current health care landscape – reimbursement cuts, a focus on cost control and the transition to EHRs – is boosting the adoption of speech recognition and transcription services, says Peter Durlach, senior VP of healthcare marketing and product strategy with Nuance Communications. His company’s health care business offers a portfolio of speech-enabled clinical documentation and communication solutions.

In North America, medical transcription services account for about $7 to $10 billion in costs for hospitals using both in-house and outsourced transcriptionists, says Durlach.


“Speech, depending on which product you’re talking about and depending on the specific adoption curve, as well as the needs of a given health care organization, can eliminate anywhere from 25 percent of the reliance and cost associated with medical transcription up to 100 percent,” he says.

Individual physicians may or may not be affected by the financial savings associated with speech recognition services. However, employing such solutions allows them to complete their notes quickly and spend more time with their patients.

Regardless, physicians at Rockingham Memorial will continue to rely on speech recognition and transcription solutions.

“We’re always trying to reduce costs in health care and make it more efficient for the physicians to do work and make sure that the quality, accuracy and timeliness of the documentation to care for the patients is available to them,” says Rozmus. “If we improve our documentation process, we can make better and faster clinical decisions by having all the data available to the physicians.”

In addition to the potential savings, transcription services can assist in bolstering the budget. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently released the final “meaningful use” rules facilities can use to assess their eligibility for the associated financial incentives. Streamlining documentation processes can expedite the conversion to EHRs and place providers in a better position to reap the rewards.

“I think speech recognition is certainly a technology that, in the last probably two or three years, has really reached its maturity level in health care. It’s really become part of the way we do business,” says Rozmus. “We’re even looking at expanding our use of it as we move towards our complete electronic medical record, where physicians are actually doing more of their documentation within the electronic chart.”

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