New EHRs Listen to Doctors

Advances in voice-recognition technology could make electronic health records more palatable for doctors whose typing is as bad as their writing.

Health IT companies are integrating voice-recognition software into electronic health records, giving physicians instant feedback on potential problems as they dictate patient information, reports USA Today. The work reportedly has caught the eye of hospitals implementing EHRs.

"Physicians prefer to narrate and dictate. They don't want to point and click," Juergen Fritsch, co-founder of M*Modal, tells the newspaper. Fritsch's company is working on technology that allows doctors to record information on mobile devices as they consult with patients, according to the paper.

Nuance Communications Inc., which makes Dragon voice-recognition software, is testing decision-support technology at hospitals, including the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, according to the report. Nuance also is partnering with IBM to integrate voice-recognition with Watson "deep question answering natural language processing" in a health IT setting.

Watson is the IBM computer that bested two human champions on the quiz show Jeopardy!