As the healthcare industry continues to grow, so does the demand for medical transcription services. In order to stand out from its competitors, a medical transcription company must have good speech recognition software in place to meet the needs of a variety of different clients. There are a number of speech recognition software options available in the market today. In fact, there are too many choices out there that it would be difficult for you to choose the right one. You may wonder, “Why is there a need to screen them?” Well, the truth is not all of them are worth it.
Let us in this article, walk you through the tips to help you pick the best ASR software.
- Opt for the software that is developed by experts. Do an extensive research on the company that produced it. Find out who their partners are. See if their affiliates or collaborators rank top in the industry. Also make sure to inquire if they have produced high-quality applications for other industries.
- Turnaround time and accuracy are also the important features to look for in choosing the right speech to text software.
- Consider choosing the software that uses the latest technology and has a user friendly interface.
- Determine how precisely the software converts speech to text. When it comes to assessing its performance and accuracy it is recommended to calculate the ‘word error rate’. The lower the error rate, the higher the accuracy of the software will be.
- The transcription software should be armed with all security features. Keep in mind that you are dealing with sensitive health information. So make sure to choose the best transcription software that guarantees that all of your clients’ sensitive data are fully protected and that your reputation is safe.
- Purchase the software that best suits your requirements. Do not opt for the ones that require you to purchase additional programs or any upgrades. However, if necessary, you should be able to implement upgrades and additions as your business grows. But that doesn’t mean you’ll have to pay for new updates once every few months to keep your system up-to-date.
- Go for the advanced speech recognition software to take advantage of the built-in word expander and medical spell check dictionary. It should accommodate the enormous number of medical terms that are used by the healthcare providers.
- Check how secure the speech recognition software is by looking into the software’s privacy policy.
- Make sure that the software provides tools to quickly edit the transcripts once done. The speech recognition tool should automatically detect sentence boundaries, punctuation marks and capitalizations.
Be wary of any speech recognition software that is advertised as performing better than humans. However, speech recognition technology has advanced so much so that the best transcription software boasts an error rate that is significantly less than 5%. While a huge investment might be needed up-front to buy the most advanced and sophisticated speech-to-text software, it will easily pay for itself in the long run.