The Voice of Medicine

Drowning in Data

Technology has become an integral part of healthcare, sometimes to the chagrin of the clinicians – not to mention the feelings of practice administrators. Most health care workers spend more time interacting with the electronic health record (EHR) than the patient. Consider this further, and it is clear – after about a decade of specialized training to take care of patients, a majority of clinicians’ time is spent on data entry. From a physician entering information during an exam, to a nurse recording vitals, or a scheduler filling appointment, everyone spends hours in front of a computer. Questions remain. Does all of it have to be so tedious and even mindless? Could there be a better way? Is there a solution on the horizon that will help solve this problem?

Voice May Offer a Way Forward

Although numerous companies tout their solutions as the answer to whatever problem you may have, few have provided any real value. This could change with appropriately used voice technology, which has enormous promise to transform healthcare, in part because of enormous technologic advances being made by a range of companies from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to smaller, but no less important, specialty companies developing the robustness of voice.

Voice assistants are computer programs that receive audio inputs, recognize words, and respond with audio output in a manner perceived as listening to and answering questions. A user can ask “What is the weather going to be today?” and the voice assistant will respond with a weather report for the user’s location for that day. Voice is a natural means of communication, eliminating the need to stare (and type) information into a phone or computer. This is especially true for health care workers who must enter enormous amounts of information into an EHR for each patient. There must be a way to allow physicians to spend more time looking at a patient instead of staring at a computer screen. Not only will this improve providers well-being and decrease burnout, it will improve patient care. The patient and the provider will have more opportunities to feel connected during the health care visit, which improves adherence to treatment and health outcomes.