Softcover

ISBN 10: 0130993948 ISBN 13: 9780130993946

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2004

For courses in Medical Transcription and Medical Clerical. This first-of-its-kind educational tool introduces skill sets that promote successful speech recognition to students entering the profession of healthcare documentation. The texts understandable format enables students to become familiar with the history of speech recognition, gain an understanding of hardware requirements necessary to successfully operate the software, get an overview of a popular speech software program, and learn how to successfully use speech recognition for professional dictation.

From the Back Cover:

No Longer an Emerging Technology!

Speech Recognition for the Health Professions introduces the concepts of speech recognition, and most importantly, presents the primary skill sets for its efficacy as a professional dictation tool. You'll learn about:

• Medical Transcription Educator National Speech Recognition Survey
• History and Hardware Requirements of Speech Recognition
• Improving Recognition Accuracy
• Primary Efficacy Skill Sets

Speech Recognition is the new data entry paradigm for the healthcare market—using back- and front-end applications. Now is the time to learn to use this technology to benefit you in the production of medical documentation.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Speech recognition systems require a new user to learn how to use a microphone properly and require patience in learning complex software programs, especially learning how to correct recognition mistakes. This is essential to the training and proper functioning of these speech recognition systems. A naive user cannot simply pick up the system and instantly use it. They must learn the system and train it; nevertheless the process is quite natural.

Fleming and Andersen
Speech Technology Magazine, Oct/Nov 1997

Speech recognition (SR) is changing many aspects of medical dictation and will continue to have a significant impact in health professions in the coming decade. Speech recognition will improve, and users will adopt new methodologies for dictation. In Speech Recognition for the Health Professions, I take a very realistic approach introducing SR with practical exercises for healthcare professionals. It is important to have reasonable expectations about speech recognition. These applications are not magical programs that automatically process documents. Speech recognition is an effective methodology to automate the way dictation is actually transcribed and transferred into electronic data format for entering patient information into the electronic medical record (EMR). Speech recognition is simply another methodology used to enter data into a computer.

The deployment of automatic speech recognition (ASR) will bring increased value and efficiency to transcription markets by improving the productivity of human labor. ASR is most effective when looked upon not as replacing transcription labor, but as a means of increasing the productivity of transcription labor through faster job completion, elimination of mundane formatting tasks, and reduction of errors in transcribed documents.

Scott Faulkner,
Speech Machines, Inc.

Healthcare Informatics (February 1999) identified speech recognition as one of nine hot technology trends for the healthcare profession. The national Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) leadership survey (1999) reported that large medical facilities recognize and plan to develop and implement SR technology in the coming years. The HIMSS survey also listed speech recognition as the top emerging technology. Thirty-one percent of the 1,754 healthcare IT professionals who responded to the survey said they would likely begin using speech recognition in the coming year. Healthcare professionals who learn skill sets in using speech recognition will ensure job viability for the future.

Over 6 years ago, if someone asked me what I knew about speech recognition, my reply would have been vastly different than it is today. I would have thought that it simply meant understanding someone's speech, trying to interpret speech patterns of a child who is autistic, or trying to understand the vocal patterns of a person with a hearing impairment. I often think of my high school drama teacher, Mrs. West, when I first got involved with speech recognition. Mrs. West diligently taught her drama students the proper pronunciation and sound distinction between the words pin and pen. She repeatedly instructed students to pronounce the differences of the I sound and the e sound, respectively. Speech recognition, however, should not be perceived or equated with human auditory perception of human speech (although the future goals of speech recognition companies are working toward this achievement). In July 1997 the first commercially viable continuous speech recognition application, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, was introduced. The hardware specifications did not support the memory and processor speed necessary for speech recognition to function as a usable professional software application. Today, fast processors and larger memory capabilities of PCs allow speech recognition to operate efficiently for use in professional dictation. Speech recognition is becoming the new paradigm of data entry, and we will see major advances in this technology.

The purpose of this first edition provides health professionals the knowledge base to become professionally competent in the use of speech recognition. This book includes content information and detailed exercises for health professionals in becoming knowledgeable and proficient using speech recognition. The text is not intended to update users about specific upgrades, nuances, and functioning of each new version of ScanSoft's Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS). In fact, there are other speech recognition software programs that work on the same level of functionality as DNS, with only subtle differences in user functionality and operation. DNS was chosen primarily because of its historical mainstay as one of the primary speech recognition engines in the market and my familiarity with the product: User's guides sold with each speech software brand and version upgrade will provide the user with subtle differences in operation and changes of upgrades of speech software. The specific skill sets introduced in this text will remain the same regardless of the chosen speech recognition software.

The book is divided into two sections: Part I provides a general overview of speech recognition topics and Part II includes practical exercises for competency in speech recognition. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to speech recognition, its impact on health professions, and includes tree-top results of a national survey of medical transcription educators. A review of the history of speech recognition as a developing technology is covered in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 introduces to the reader topics of sound, human speech, and microphones. Chapter 4 examines hardware requirements, in addition to a basic explanation of operation of speech recognition software. Chapter 5 provides the reader with the necessary information to improve recognition accuracy. An introduction of handheld recorders, with a review of digital recorders for use in speech recognition transcription, is provided in Chapter 6. Part II (Chapters 7-10) provides the reader with practical experiences and exercises in using speech recognition. Chapter 7 covers enrolling a voice profile, punctuation, mobility skill sets, and introductory exercises. Chapter 8 introduces managing vocabularies, Vocabulary Editor, and proper correction techniques. The creation of new commands (normals and templates) and an introduction to basic scripting is discussed in Chapter 9. Chapter 10 introduces skill sets exercises for various medical subspecialties. Chapter 11 is the conclusion, with a discussion of the psychology of technological change.

Upon completion of the text, students will know the history of speech recognition, have an understanding of hardware requirements necessary to successfully operate the software, have an overview of a popular speech software program, and know how to successfully use speech recognition for professional dictation. Health professionals will find speech recognition to be an invaluable asset to support a successful professional career.