One of the frustrating things about using Desktop based EMRs is that unless you are a very fast typist, entering text will slow you down. While it would be nice to have voice dictation enabled directly in the EMR, unfortunately that is not the case for most EMRs today which don’t seem to have doctors designed in mind.
I have been exploring various ways to use voice dictation in order to enter progress notes in the EMR.
Initially I had played around with the use of a microphone and the free Google Voice Typing feature of Google Docs. While this is highly accurate (I would say on par with Dragon Dictate) and free as long as you have an Internet connection, it is still tied down to a desktop or laptop browser.
Voice recognition with Google voice typing on Android phones or Siri on iPhones has come a long way and the accuracy I would say is quite astonishing these days. So one solution which would untether you from the desktop would be to use your mobile phone as the point of entry for voice typing and get this automatically synced to a web based application and you can then copy and paste the text from the web application into your EMR progress notes.
Some solutions come to mind:
1) Use Docs on the phone and sync with Google docs
2) Google Keep (app on phone and extension for Chrome browser)
3) One Note
4) Evernote
5) Simplenote
My current favorite is Simplenote. I used to be a subscriber but the Simplenote service and apps are now completely free thanks to Automattic (the makers of WordPress) and unlike the others, there is unlimited storage.
Progress notes in EMR are simple and don’t need formatting usually, so Simplenote is suitable but if you need formatting, Simplenote now supports Markdown formatting
Links
To run Simplenote on your browser, go to simple-note.appspot.com. Creating an account is free, so go ahead and create one if you haven’t already done so.
Download the SImplenote app:
Android
iOS
In the mobile app, use the voice typing utility which is the Microphone icon on your keyboard. Just tap on it and begin speaking and it will dictate text into the Simplenote app on your mobile.
What happens in real-time is that the text will be synced with the Simplenote web app and you can then copy and paste the text from the web app into your EMR progress notes.
This quick video illustrates how it is done
You’ll find that the accuracy, even for medical terms and drug names, is quite good. If there are concerns about privacy, you could of course Cut and Paste, deleting the notes from Simplenotes, retaning them only in your EMR, after you have finished dictating.