Speech Recognition in Healthcare

Medical field turns to be one of the slowest to adopt new technologies in paper turnover. Everyone has spent hours filling in forms with the same info at some medical practice: name, address, phone number, employer, spouse's name, and so on. EMR  is now a swiftly developing market but truck drivers in the US bought  Radio Shack TRS for recordkeeping and costing about 30 years ago.
But some estimates are quite optimistic providing such data as about 150,000 U.S. physicians currently using speech recognition software to record and transcribe information about patient visits and treatments and the given number is more than three times bigger than three years ago. The number seems to be a bit of exaggeration, taking into account lots of drawbacks  the SRS still faces. But the predicted drive in using speech recognition is caused by enormous potential cost-savings which is an extremely luring factor. The famous research agency Datamonitor considers that the healthcare speech recognition market will double in size between now and 2013. Software companies’ representatives are even more optimistic promising a breakthrough in using speech recognition modules in conjunction with electronic medical records, picture archiving, workflow applications and more.
According to the American Medical Transcription Association estimates every year about $12 billion is spent to transcribe medical dictation into medical text. Speech recognition  applications allow  to almost immediately record and distribute information, especially when it is integrated with health IT systems.  The basic speech recognition is also used for commanding and controlling applications and devices, which in its  turn allows a hands-free environment for a range of specialists working in radiology, pathology, or cardiology. The technology also allows using templates and contributes to macro development, such as pre-defined text blocks and voice navigation. No doubt, many Electronic Medical Records  applications would be more successful and easy to operate when complemented with a speech recognition option. It would speed up and facilitate searches and queries when performed by voice rather than by using a keyboard.