My wife is an ER physician and I went down the path of a similar idea as well, because I saw how awful her life was in trying to maintain meaningful records for her patients. #1 is very true - especially when you take into account all the various medical specialties in the industry.
As I did my research, I reasoned that a Dragon Dictation-esque solution may be best. However, such a solution already exists. And built by Dragon Dictation too, coincidentally.
It's a very efficient solution for doctors in case #2. They can just dictate their patient notes to an audio recorder, and the software is intelligent enough to sort it out appropriately, with perhaps 80-90% accuracy. However, for patient records, you need to have it at 100% accuracy, otherwise you could face medical malpractice. So the current products require doctors to review their notes on a confirmation screen on their handheld tablet devices (yup, it's on a tablet device much like an iPad). The result? Most busy doctors just hit SUBMIT without reviewing their notes, and their 80-90% accurate patient notes get recorded. Medical groups saw this behavior and have been moving away from these types of products.
I'm gleaming over a lot of details, but this is the gist of what I found. This is definitely a problem begging for a solution, so I wish DrChrono a ton of luck in solving it.
Speech to text is one cool feature we are integrating now, but is still just one feature.
Hospitals and doctor offices are two completely different markets with very different needs and scales. Speech to text doesn't address managing a doctors appointment book, communicating with patients, giving drug-drug interaction checking, etc.
True, hospitals and doctor's offices are completely different animals. I was only looking at hospitals at the time, which has the added disadvantage of requiring long sales cycles. Doctor's offices should be a much easier sell.
Good luck with the speech-to-text feature! I agree with niels_olson that text entry on a touchscreen is painful. I'm glad to hear you've already got a solution in the works. Best wishes!
As I did my research, I reasoned that a Dragon Dictation-esque solution may be best. However, such a solution already exists. And built by Dragon Dictation too, coincidentally.
It's a very efficient solution for doctors in case #2. They can just dictate their patient notes to an audio recorder, and the software is intelligent enough to sort it out appropriately, with perhaps 80-90% accuracy. However, for patient records, you need to have it at 100% accuracy, otherwise you could face medical malpractice. So the current products require doctors to review their notes on a confirmation screen on their handheld tablet devices (yup, it's on a tablet device much like an iPad). The result? Most busy doctors just hit SUBMIT without reviewing their notes, and their 80-90% accurate patient notes get recorded. Medical groups saw this behavior and have been moving away from these types of products.
I'm gleaming over a lot of details, but this is the gist of what I found. This is definitely a problem begging for a solution, so I wish DrChrono a ton of luck in solving it.