This statement prompted me to write to the article author for a clarification:

Medical transcription is estimated to be a multi-billion dollar market and is expected to double in the next five years.

While I’d like to believe this is true, I have a difficult time believing it to be accurate. Medical transcription volumes have been reduced – and I anticipate they will continue to be reduced – as a result of EMRs and speech recognition. The author of the article kindly responded with a reference for the statement.

She referred me to an article at The Free Library: Healthcare automation driving growth in speech technology. In this article, the statement reads:

The market for speech recognition within healthcare will double in the next five years.

Now – that makes so much more sense! Because as we can see in the same article:

Using speech recognition with digital dictation systems, to dictate notes directly into EHRs, means that doctors can update information faster and with lower error rates.

The first article mentions medical transcription just briefly, with the notable misunderstanding of what is stated in the second article. The second article, however, seems to indicate that the author doesn’t have a clear understanding of how the process works. First of all, EHR and EMR are not interchangeable terms. A doctor dictating a note is more likely dictating it into an EMR, not an EHR. Second, if a provider is dictating notes directly into the EMR, then they aren’t dictating into a digital dictation system – they’re dictating it into the EMR, presumably (in light of the subject of the article) with speech recognition enabled to make the job easier/faster.

The market for speech recognition in healthcare doubling in the next 5 years doesn’t necessarily translate to a larger market share for medical transcription. In fact, according to the article:

Speech recognition is also being used for medical transcription, easing pressure on transcriptionists and allowing healthcare providers to save on staffing costs.

If the volume of dictation doubled, then there would be a requirement for MORE medical transcriptionists, and therefore no savings on staffing (or outsourcing) costs. But let’s suppose for a moment that the actual dictation volume does increase; the focus of the article is on speech recognition handling large volumes of the work – again, delivering a savings on staffing costs, presumably in reduction of transcription staff.

The article at the Free Library refers to an independent market analyst Datamonitor discusses speech recognition and its use in the medical industry for transcription and dictation (link only to the abstract at Scribd.com).Unfortunately, as much as I’d like to obtain it and sift through the very specific information it apparently contains, the Datamonitor report referred to is expensive and I have no real need for it that justifies the expense. We can see in the abstract, however, that it does report in future trends:

Speech recognition will become more embedded within document workflow and automation solutions.

Medical transcriptionists have been hearing about speech recognition for many, many years but only now is the full impact of the technology coming to bear in the industry. Technology rarely goes backward; if what we see today is becoming more and more useful in healthcare documentation, what we can expect to see in the future is better technology and a wider range of applications.

The point of this post is primarily to beat a drum I’ve been beating for many years; i.e., it’s important not to accept a statement as true or factual without checking the knowledge base of the author and the source of the statements. It would be a fallacy for the medical transcription industry to pick up and run with the statement “medical transcription… is expected to double in the next five years.”