Virtualization software and dictation with speech recognition are likely to see increased uptake among hospitals in coming years, according to data from HIMSS Analytics.
The data, which is drawn from its Essentials of the U.S. Hospital Market, Autumn 2013 report, suggests that virtualization and dictation with speech recognition are top areas for growth potential, ahead of most other apps profiled in the report.
According to a HIMSS statement, these findings are consistent with other research the organization has done in the past which has suggested growing adoption of voice recognition-based transcription technologies.
The HIMSS report also concludes that demand for ambulatory EMRs and ambulatory PACS seems to be growing, according to the press release.
My colleague John Lynn and I had a huddle to discuss these results and while I see the growth in demand for voice recognition, he’s a bit more skeptical. In his view, voice recognition hasn’t changed much over the last couple of years, so it’s not clear to him whey there’d be an upsurge in demand now. Did Siri-like technologies make us more comfortable with voice recognition?
The only exception to this, he suggested, may be some integration deals that Nuance did with Cerner and Epic that might cause an increase in voice recognition adoption. However, this will only be mostly those who wanted voice recognition already as opposed to converting new people to voice recognition.
On my end, I’m a bit more bullish on voice recognition technology, at least if EMRs are capable of parsing the narrative into fields in the EMR. I’m aware of some EMR vendors and some independent software vendors that are doing this or headed in that direction.
As for virtualization, John is a bit more excited about the future. After all, as he notes, there’s some cost savings and redundancy, plus fail over, that are nice benefits of virtualization. He’s also a fan of its disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities, in that if one server dies, you can roll a whole virtual machine over to another seamlessly.
As for me, I’d argue that any technical trend you see here could be changed abruptly as the EMR market shifts. Let’s see how the next Meaningful Use phase, and the further consolidation of the EMR sector, affects what’s hot and what’s not.
