Healthcare providers are interested in the cloud and in speech recognition, even though their spending on electronic health records (EHR) and electronic medical records (EMR) has slowed.
Data recently released by HIMSS Analytics has confirmed an earlier analysis, released by Millennium Research Group (MRG), which stated that EHR spending would start to decline in 2013. Spending is decreasing because most organizations that could afford new EHR systems have already purchased them using federal and state government incentives.
Even though the EHR/EMR markets are saturated, the relatively low market penetration of virtualization and speech recognition applications has created exciting opportunities for growth in those market segments. Vendors of ambulatory EMR and ambulatory picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) applications should also see success in the coming years.
For example, TMCnet recently reported on a company called Nuance Communications, makers of Dragon Dictation products for desktop computers, recording devices and mobile smartphones and tablets. One of their products, Dragon Medical 360, can take doctors' dictation after an appointment and transfer the narrative into the patient's EHR.
Nuance (News - Alert) recently released a cloud service called Clinic 360 | Transcription, which processes physician dictation through Dragon Medical over a secure connection and then generates written documentation. Physicians can then edit and sign the documents, print them or email them to other providers.
According to Maureen Ladouceur, who is Honeywell's (News - Alert) VP of Clinical Operations for VoiceFirst, providers spend about half of their days dealing with documentation and data.
"We will see more and more dominance with regard to voice,” Ladouceur explained to EHRIntelligence.com. “Voice will leapfrog keystroke-based applications over the next three to five years. That will become one of the primary preferences amongst providers.”
The most successful solutions, according to Ladouceur, will be solutions that can accommodate physician preferences.
"Some people are more auditory; some are more visual," she said. "Solutions that can mirror multiple capabilities are going to be the preferred solutions moving forward."
Edited by Rory J. Thompson