Whenever I hear talk about “Voice Recognition” software, I think of Scotty in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home when he and Bones have traveled back to our time and have to use a computer. See the clip here. While VR is certainly a reality in the here and now, we are still light years away from anything remotely like what we see in the movies.
While there are companies who already use VR, these reports still MUST be edited by MTs. Last year, I was offered two different positions with a company, one on an account that used VR at 4.5 cpl and one “regular” account at 7.5 cpl. I ended up taking a better paying position with another company who recognized “mah skillz”, so I personally have never worked with VR generated reports. If any of my readers have worked with VR, I’d like to hear your take on it. Are you making as much income being an editor for VR as you were typing “verbatim” as an MT? I would be most interested to hear all about your experiences, good or bad.
Obviously VR will never, ever, ever completely replace a human being at the end of the process ensuring that the finished product is 100% error free. Below is a 3.5 minute video produced by home-medical-transcription.com that says essentially the same thing in the nice, friendly, patronizing way that industrial videos do: (Sigh, I’m going to have to get my own domain, WordPress kicked out my embedded video… you can see it here)
The company I currently work for has certain accounts that are VR, but then there are those physicians who will NEVER be able to take advantage of VR for a plethora of reasons. Personally, I think it’s because they don’t want to take the time to learn how to dictate for VR, because it would mean they would have to speak intelligibly on a regular basis, and that’s a stretch for most docs I know…
Another good YouTube video is about 10 minutes long and has a grand overview of electronic medical records, but a physician at Beth-Israel addresses VR at 5:15 from the hospital point of view. Obviously, our roles are going to eventually change to more editing with VR than typing… but to do so will still require education and training in medical transcription, no doubt about that.
It’s okay, you can stop wringing your hands, no computer is EVER going to be able to replace a person, no matter how hard they try. Oh, there have been incredible breakthroughs in technology, no doubting that, but no computer will ever be able to match the human brain in terms of speed, logic, and reasoning. Medical transcription is one profession with definite job security for the long-run.
