What are Ambient Voice Technologies in the Medical Field?
In the last ten years, ambient voice technology has developed significantly. From our phones to our cars to our homes, we’ve come to rely on voice technology as our personal digital assistant. Now, ambient voice technology is making its way into the medical field, and helping bring the joy back to medicine.
What does that ambient voice technology look like in action?
The most common applications of ambient voice technology in the medical field exist in the exam room. Here, clinicians can rely on a host of new products to help them navigate, track, and log elements of a patient visit. These tools require the provider to use vocal commands to prompt the device of a specific note field or highlight a certain parameter, helping log patient data and information.
Ambient voice technology in the medical field helps clinicians create more timely notes and allows them to focus more intently on the patient. It also partially negates some of the common issues we have discussed like costs, intrusiveness, data security, and functional creep.
These tools have proved useful and efficient in lieu of medical scribes, dictation tools and speech-to-text devices. But are they truly ambient?
Is ambient voice technology truly ambient?
Ever think about the ambience of a great restaurant? That feeling you get when there’s great food, service, lighting, and live music? Something maybe you can’t fully grasp or put your finger on, but is deeply present in all elements of your surroundings. Something in the air.
To create that ambient atmosphere in a medical setting, you need a tool that can do everything. The problem is, most ambient tools in the medical field, despite being AI-powered and despite helping clinicians with note taking, are not all-encompassing. They are not like air.
This is primarily due to the fact that these tools rely heavily on voice-activation to do their intended job. If you have to remind the chefs to cook your food at that great restaurant, or ask the band to play the music, how does that impact the ambience?
Voice technology in the medical field is no different. Sometimes, interrupting a patient visit to talk to a device can be disruptive and choppy, and ultimately cause some degree of damage to the level of care, despite the intent.
Furthermore, most “ambient” voice technology tools in the medical setting are not incredibly useful outside of the exam room, and don’t integrate well into electronic health record workflows. Those that do help populate notes into EHR’s don’t do so “ambiently” — they again rely on voice activation. In a disappointing reality, most “ambient” solutions are simply robust dictation tools, rather than the ambient digital assistants that they claim to be.
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What does a true ambient voice technology look like?
Simply, a true ambient voice technology tool in the medical field is something that works 100 percent in the background and is 100 percent all-encompassing. A true ambient tool is that great restaurant. In every facet.
In the medical field this means a device that doesn’t need to be prompted by voice. A device that can take on multiple speakers, all-over-the-place conversations, and interruptions all without making mistakes.
This also means a device that has an all-encompassing approach to your workflow. A device that requires less than one edit per note, and a device that automatically populates that note directly within the discrete fields of a clinician's EHR. A device that not only writes your notes, but documents and logs them as well.
Something that is fully customizable, fully integrated, and fully committed to giving clinicians their lives back. As many as three hours a day. Or as many as six additional patients a day.
That device?
That’s DeepScribe.
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