The patent is for the use of phonetic and linguistic features of recorded audio paired with speech recognition results to add new structure and content to speech recognition output. The new features can include periods, commas, numbered list identification, heading identification and identifiers for medication lists. “As a practical matter”, said CEO Nicholas Mahurin, named in the patent, “this simply means better speech recognition.”
The company’s primary use of this technology is the accelerated creation of health care records from physician dictation. Narrative documentation is essential to telling a patient’s health story. Physicians do not dictate formatting, and they rarely dictate punctuation – both of which are important for quality records. The intellectual property (IP) involved in this patent forms part of InfraWare’s service known as the First Draft Dictation Recognition Service. As the name implies, this recognition engine was built from the ground up to specialize in health care dictation.
InfraWare’s software platform helps pull time and cost out of the capture of health records. Physicians dictate the details of patient encounters to capture documentation in an efficient manner. Historically, medical transcriptionists listened to such dictation and typed what they heard. In the InfraWare model, back-end speech recognition is performed to generate a First Draft ™. The medical transcriptionist becomes an editor as they can listen to the audio and correct a rough draft in much less time. Naturally, the better the draft, the faster the process. The company’s punctuation and formatting technology helps contribute needed content that does not come from simply recognizing the words dictated, thereby saving additional time.
“Faster turnaround and lower costs are precisely the kinds of solutions every healthcare enterprise needs today”, continued Mahurin.
About InfraWare
Founded in 2003, InfraWare has more than a decade of innovation in healthcare documentation technology.
InfraWare also sponsored the Health Story Project (HSP) and provided executive committee leadership to ensure that the rich narrative of patient encounters is captured in the patient’s electronic medical record during the move to structured data to support Meaningful Use (MU/MACRA). HSP developed Consolidated CDA – a streamlined set of templates using common components so that files could easily be shared between EMR systems and service providers. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) included Consolidated CDA in MU Stage 2 (MU2) rules for certified EMRs.
Today, the suite of InfraWare products and services support Consolidated CDA to empower clinicians to dictate encounters to save time and provide better care and documentation by relying on our ASR software and medical language specialists to handle the documentation.