Using dictation, podcasts, and Transcribr podcast transcriptions for clincal records

Most of the medical community is probably not terribly interested in podcasts yet but I suspect that digital recordings that many physicians make for medical records can be turned into transcriptions and easily inserted into medical records using upcoming services like Enablr’s Transcribr. Now, they’re not super-cheap, but the idea is great (especially for $1 a minute which is cheaper than many full-service bureaus). As we already know, transcriptions in the medical/clinical world are some of the largest portions of healthcare budgets so anything that can help reduce that cost and burden will be more meaningful than new software.

Here’s what I think a new company, similar to Enablr, could offer — you digitize your medical chart note into a podcast format (mp3), which these days is pretty easy and getting easier, and they’ll watch the podcast streams and transcribe them automatically (sending back the data in a meaningful way attached to a record and in printed form).

Of course, the biggest problem will be security and privacy management but that could be worked out easily if there’s a big enough market. Today podcasts are designed for open reading and subscriptions (for money). But, if we could design a secure way to upload a file and using standard technologies (nothing proprietary) we could any service that offers podcast transcriptions and make transcriptions are commodity that we could switch vendors to/from easily.

Now, why would this be useful? Because if podcasts that are created for medical records could be tagged with a patient ID then almost everything else could be automated. As soon as a dictation is finished, just upload the file and it will be automatically transcribed and attached. Nice.

By the way, modern digital dictation tools (like the Olympus WS-100 I use) are already USB devices and taking a file and dropping onto your computer is trivial now.