The payoff has been significant for Kece, whose practice has 14 cardiologists in eight offices. Her practice used to employ five in-house transcriptionists. "The service costs about half the price, plus you don't have to pay vacation or medical benefits," she says of the method they've used for about a year now.

Users of these transcription services may find that they have to speak fairly slowly, and the editing process to correct inaccuracies can be time consuming. Still, says Kece, "The transcription service works well for this practice because many of the physicians have heavy accents," says Kece. "You have to train the voice recognition programs, and it would have been too much time up-front for these doctors to do that."

Something old, something new

Considering that both transcription services and voice recognition software vendors emphasize that different options will work best depending upon office variables, the answer may even be to combine methods, as some physicians do.

Allen Rothpearl, a Long Island radiologist, says the way to go is using the new and the old options. "I use both because my transcriptionist is saturated," he says. Rothpearl, who was a programmer and systems analyst prior to attending medical school, adds, "My number one choice for transcription is in-house. They pick up things a service wouldn't. If you're in-house you know how the practice operates — they pick up misspellings of a patient or doctor's name. And my transcriptionist can say to me, 'did you mean to say this or did you mean to say that?'"

It seems that for some practices, despite continuing advances in technology, the human touch remains as important as ever. "If I have Lorraine downstairs, who has worked for me for 15 years and does everything for me and will make my report exactly how I want it to be, why should I do anything different?" says Geeta Sankappanavar, CEO of Intellirecords.

Rothpearl adds: "As computers get more powerful, ultimately I think voice recognition will be the choice. But I don't think it will ever really replace a live transcriptionist. Machines are machines, but with humans you get that personal touch."

Karen Gatzke can be reached at editor@physicianspractice.com.

This article originally appeared in the November/December 2001 issue of Physicians Practice.