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Imho, the first thing doctors need to learn (at least in my country) is to touch type. I've had it with 5 min exams followed by 15 minutes of pecking to type in
by dsego 1y ago
Imho, the first thing doctors need to learn (at least in my country) is to touch type. I've had it with 5 min exams followed by 15 minutes of pecking to type in the necessary forms. Multiply by number of patients in a day and it adds up, and it's prevalent, family doctors, dentists, specialists, nobody bothers to learn it. Gets tiresome when you know you're in the waiting room for a couple of hours because they are slow at typing.
- makapuf 1y agoTouch typing for doctors seems a waste of time now that Dragon / Whisper / your phone can do Speech to text quickly and relatively reliably.
- ileonichwiesz 1y agoSure, let’s send private medical data to a cloud server somewhere for processing, because a medical professional in 2025 can’t be expected to know how to use a keyboard. That’s absurd.
- roflmaostc 1y agoMedical companies could self host their speech to text translation. At the end the medical data is also on some servers stored. So doing speech -> text translation seems just efficient and not too much worrying if done properly.
- theoreticalmal 1y agoSo you think the better solution to doctors not being able to try is for them to self-host a speech to text translation systems, rather than teaching doctors to type faster?
- pbh101 1y agoTheir healthcare/IT provider like Epic would do it. And in fact some have already done it, from what I can see. Furthermore, preparing/capturing docs is just one type of task specialization and isn’t that crazy: stenographers in courtrooms or historically secretaries taking dictation come to mind. Should we throw away an otherwise perfectly good doctor just for typing skills?
- ileonichwiesz 1y agoWho is responsible when the speech-to-text model (which often works well, but isn’t trained on the thousands of similar-sounding drug names) prescribes Klonopin instead of Clonidine and the patient ends up in a coma? These models definitely aren’t foolproof, and in fact have been known to write down random stuff in the absence of recognisable speech: https://koenecke.infosci.cornell.edu/files/CarelessWhisper_ExtendedAbstract.pdf https://koenecke.infosci.cornell.edu/files/CarelessWhisper_E...
- nradov 1y agoThis isn't a speech recognition problem per se. The attending physician is legally accountable regardless of who does the transcription. Human transcriptionists also make mistakes. That's why physicians are required to sign the report before it becomes a final part of the patient chart. In a lot of provider organizations, certain doctors are chronically late about reviewing and signing their reports. This slows down the revenue cycle because bills can't be sent out without final documentation so the administrative staff have to nag the doctors to clear their backlogs.
- roflmaostc 1y agoI imagine where the speech to text listens to the final diagnosis (or even the consultation) and summarizes everything in a PDF. Of course privacy aware (maybe some local hosted form). And then the doctors double checks and signs everything. I feel like, often you go to the doctor an 80% of the time they stare at the screen and type something. If this could get automated and more time is spent on the patient, great!
- regularfry 1y agoNone of those options are off-device.
- magicmicah85 1y agoMost EHRs are sending that text input to the cloud for storage anyway. Voice transcription is already a feature of some EHRs.
- devilbunny 1y agoI can type quite well. I can also troubleshoot minor IT issues. Neither is a better use of my time than seeing patients. I’m in an unusual situation as an anesthesiologist; I don’t have a clinic to worry about, so my rate-limiting factor isn’t me, it’s the surgeon. EMR is extremely helpful for me because 90% of my preop workup is based on documentation, and EMR not only makes that easy but lets me do it while I still have the previous patient under anesthesia. I actually need to talk to 95% of patients for about 30 seconds, no more. But my wife is primarily a thinking rather than doing doctor, and while she can type well, why in the hell do we want doctors being typists for dictation of their exams? Yes, back in the old days, doctors did it by hand, but they also wrote things like “exam normal” for a well-baby visit. You can’t get paid for that today; you have to generate a couple of paragraphs that say “exam normal”. Incidentally, as for cloud service, if your hospital uses Epic, your patients’ info is already shared, so security is already out of your hands.
- kstrauser 1y agoMacs have pretty decent on-device transcription these days. That’s what I set up for my wife and her practice’s owner for dictation because a whole lot of privacy issues disappear with that setup. The absurdity is that doctors have to enter a metric shit ton of information after every single visit even when there’s no clearly compelling need for it for simple office visits beyond “insurance and/or Medicare” requires it. If you’re being seen for the first time because of chest pain, sure. If you’re returning for a follow up for a laceration you had sewn closed, “patient is in similar condition as last time, but the wound has healed and left a small scar” would be medically sufficient. Alas, no, the doctor still has to dictate “Crime and Punishment” to get paid.
- zbentley 1y agoThis has been happening for years, long pre-dating LLMs or the current AI hype. There are a huge number of companies in the medical transcription space. Some are software companies that ingest data to the cloud as you say. Some are remote/phone transcription services, which pass voice data to humans to transcribe it. Those humans then store it in the cloud when it is returned to a doctor's office. Some are EMR-integrated transcription services which are either cloud-based with the rest of the EMR or, for on-premise EMRs, ship data to/from the cloud for transcription.
- lostlogin 1y ago> now that Dragon / Whisper / your phone can do Speech to text quickly and relatively reliably. It’s less accurate and much slower than a human typist (or 3) typing dictated reports. Tested over years in an MSK radiology clinic.
- fsloth 1y agoNo. Just no. Teaching doctors touch typing is tending to the secondary symptom of the fact doctors should not waste time inputting routine data. What doctors need would be secretarial services trained in medical procedures.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoI think this is one of the use cases where speech-to-text and (AI) transcription tools would be useful. Of course ideally there'd be two people, one doing the medical stuff and the other then documentation, but health care is expensive enough as it is.
- patrakov 1y ago> Of course ideally there'd be two people, one doing the medical stuff and the other then documentation, but health care is expensive enough as it is. In the 1980s USSR, every doctor actually had a nurse who did the paperwork. And somehow, healthcare was still free.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nradov 1y agoMedical scribes are a thing. Some provider organizations employee people who attend patient encounters and do all the EHR data entry in order to free up clinicians for higher value work. This generally works well, but it is expensive and payers don't directly reimburse for that service.
- lostlogin 1y agoIt turns out that peach to text is slower than dictating and having a typist type. The speed at which reports are dictated is incredible and even when familiar with the field it’s hard to understand how the typists are getting it right.
- fsloth 1y agoAll the dentists I've ever visited have worked in doctor/nurse pairings. The nurse assists in operations AND is the data entry expert. I think it's just about bureaucratic faux-economical thinking infringing to doctors workspace cutting overall effectiveness.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoI used to do support for a service that did transcription for doctors. The doctors would call in and tell the medical transcriptionist what to type and they would do the input. It always seemed incredibly inefficient and expensive but hospital management told me this was the most dependable way to get accurate records and even a single lost lawsuit would cost more than the service. It's stupid, but that's the world we live in.