What are Speech-to-Text Medical Solutions?

Note: This article was originally published when AI scribing was still emerging. Today, ambient AI has far surpassed traditional dictation and speech-to-text tools in both capability and clinical impact.

For a more current perspective on ambient AI and what to look for, check out this post about why generic AI solutions fall short.

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What are Speech-to-Text Medical Solutions?

Over the last few years, speech-to-text medical solutions have become many clinicians' preferred note taking solution. They work by capturing a clinician's voice and translating their spoken words into written text using a microphone and advanced dictation software.

How are they used?

Speech-to-text medical solutions allow clinicians to step away from the computer and look up from their notepad to engage more intently with the patient. Some of these speech-to-text solutions integrate right into an exam room, where a clinician can dictate their notes as they perform exams and interact with a patient. Other clinicians use speech-to-text as post-exam note taking aids, where they dictate charts, patient information and encounter findings into their EHR.

The most advanced speech-to-text medical solutions on the market today are those that aim for a more robust solution. These medical solutions are designed to integrate both into the exam room and directly into EHRs themselves. The goal of these products is to remove some of the manual note taking processes and replace them with speech-to-text technology that can be prompted and spoken to.

Limitations of Speech-to-Text Medical Solutions

These solutions have proven to be more cost effective and slightly more efficient than a traditional scribe, but show limitations when it comes to scalability and ability to overcome more nuanced hurdles like multiple speakers.

Ultimately, however, the biggest hang up is in the fact that these speech-to-text medical solutions have simply replaced the manual note taking processes with summarizing, dictating and editing. They remove the hassle of writing and typing, but don’t significantly offset the ultimate burden of documentation. The struggle to unload that administrative weight still persists.

DeepScribe vs. Speech-to-Text Medical Solutions

This is why DeepScribe is using expertly designed technology to attack the persisting issue of documentation. Our AI-powered medical scribe is simply more robust than even the most advanced speech-to-text medical solutions. DeepScribe ambiently captures clinical encounters and transcribes them in real time. DeepScribe is highly customizable, capable of understanding input from multiple speakers, and successfully filters out irrelevant information and only populates the relevant medical information into the EHR.

Rather than alleviating the burden of note-taking and dictation just to create different work in its place, DeepScribe exists to provide greater accuracy, true time-savings, and an honest aid to help you with documentation.

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