Medical Speech Recognition In Inpatient And Outpatient Treatment - A Systematic Review

Introduction The medical documentation serves to ensure proper treatment and comprehensive information for the patient. At the same time, medical documentation takes up a large proportion of the working time of health professionals, and the increasing time pressure in everyday clinical life makes it more difficult to complete documentation promptly. With the aim of reducing the time required for medical documentation, speech recognition technologies are increasingly being used in the medical field. Nevertheless, the effect of medical speech recognition on the processing time and the quality of medical documentation appears to have been little researched to date and the existing literature does not capture the features of the current state of technology. The aim of this review is to analyse the current state of research on the effects of the use of digital speech recognition on the medical work processes, taking into account all since the year 2000 published studies of the medical disciplines.Methods The literature search was carried out using the databases Medline via PubMed and Google Scholar. The databases were searched for keywords "speech recognition", "voice recognition", "medical" and "healthcare". Under the assumption that the speech recognition technologies developed from the year 2000 onwards would be suitable for the medical-clinical field in terms of their accuracy, only the studies from 2000 or older were taken into account in this review.Results In total, the 29 studies used for this analysis yielded very different results. Compared to the alternative "dictation service", speech recognition technology proved to be more time and cost efficient. However, speech recognition was not superior to text input, mainly due to the lower observed accuracy of speech recognition.Conclusion The use of speech recognition in clinical applications shows some advantages in terms of documentation time. However, the results of these studies do not yet provide clear evidence of the benefits of this technology. For this reason, there is still a need for further extensive investigations in this field of research.