Speech Study Uncovers Benefits of Speech Recognition on Clinical Documentation

nVoq, a provider of speech recognition solutions for the healthcare industry, has been working with Amedisys, a provider of home health, hospice, and high-acuity care, to study speech recognition's impact on documentation quality and found significant improvements.

The key improvements in the quality of the hospice patient narrative when using speech recognition vs. manually typing the narrative included a 39 percent increase of the use of prognostic statements, a 35 percent improvement of statements describing disease progression, and a 10 percent increase in reporting the palliative performance scale.

During the study, Amedisys leveraged nVoq's Speech Recognition Solution to improve the quality, consistency, and timeliness of clinical narrative notes. The goal was to assess the effectiveness of speech recognition in documenting the certification of terminal illness.

"The adoption of speech recognition at Amedisys to support quality documentation has had far-reaching downstream positive impacts on patient care and operational efficiency," said Chad Hiner, vice president of customer experience at nVoq, in a statement. "I'm even more excited by the positive impact on the clinician and physician users who reported increased job satisfaction and improved work-life balance."

"We were excited by the measurable outcomes we captured during the study. We understand the operational and financial burden that documentation places on hospice agencies, and we wanted to adopt a solution that demonstrated significant improvements while not increasing the burden on physicians and clinicians," said Dr Abi Katz, vice president and executive medical director at Amedisys, in a statement.