Dive Brief:
- Despite having been around for years, just 62% of healthcare providers use speech recognition technology, a new Reaction Data report finds. Another 14% have plans to use it, but nearly a quarter say speech recognition is not on their radar.
- The market intelligence firm surveyed providers to see where speech recognition is headed, which vendors are most popular and how the technology is being integrated into EHRs.
- Among those not who do not use such tools, 19% blame budgetary constraints, while 16% said their physicians prefer to input by hand in the EHR. Other reasons for not adopting speech recognition include accuracy concerns (16%), fear that physicians won't use it (12%) and difficulty of integrating with an organization's EHR.
Dive Insight:
Demand for voice recognition is expected to grow as doctors face increasing regulations and reporting burdens. Big minds, including at Google and Nuance are working on this, and EHR vendors will want to be at the forefront when the next best solution comes along.
Physicians say they spend too much time putting information into EHRs, and that can lead to poor job satisfaction and burnout. Google, which has shown particular interest in finding AI uses in healthcare, has been working with Stanford Medical on voice recognition and job postings from the Internet giant point to continuing interest in the area.
The report found that when it comes to vendors, Nuance rules the roost with 86% of the market. The next largest purveyor is M*Modal at 12%, followed by IBM, with just 2% of market share.
Nuance also seems to be gaining the most traction and is making strides with speech-enabled EHRs, according to the report. M*Modal is a solid second contender, with IBM, Dolbey and nVoq and other smaller competitors nabbing occasional customers.
When asked which speech-enabled EHRs providers are using, 40% said Epic. The next three most popular vendors are Cerner (13%), Allscripts (9%) and Meditech (8%). Epic seems to integrate well with both Nuance and M*Modal, while Allscripts integrates better with M*Modal and Cerner does better with Nuance.
Generally, though, respondents who use voice tools are happy with the EHR integration. A full 75% reported integration is seamless, while 13% were neutral and 12% said integration was poor. Overall, Nuance has a pretty good track record, with a majority of uses reporting a seamless experience on each of the top EHRs: Cerner (86%), Epic (75%), Meditech (64%) and Allscripts (55%). While fewer have it, M*Modal got strong reviews from Epic and Allscripts users, with 100% saying integration is seamless.
That satisfaction is important when it comes to building out adoption. While 61% of speech recognition users said they are "likely to recommend" their product to someone else, 23% were neutral and 16% said they would not recommend it.
"Not perfected yet – sketchy speech recognition," one respondent wrote. "You adjust around the limitations of the system but the system does not!"