Alice LaPlante

Alice LaPlante

Consider Experience When Hiring an IT vendor

If your medical practice is growing faster than you can keep up, it may be time to consider outsourcing some or all of your IT needs. In recent years, outsourcing has become a popular – and acceptable – way to run businesses in a more efficient manner. Read more...

2007 - The Year in Review

The health care industry continues to lag behind others in its adoption of technology. Indeed, it devotes only 2 percent of its gross revenues to technology, compared to the 10 percent regularly allocated to technology products and services by financial services firms, according to a study sponsored by Kaiser Permanent Institute for Health Policy.

So, looking back upon 2007, the big news in physicians' practices is the increasing acceptance and adoption of technologies that have been around for a while, but which had previously failed to gain traction. Read more...

Speech Recognition Comes of Age

Paperwork has always been the bane of the physician's existence. No wonder, then, that there's an intense and growing interest in speech recognition technology as a way of saving both time and money when keeping patient charts and case histories accurate and up to date.

Speech recognition is a technology that turns spoken words into written ones, and stores them in a digital document such as a word processing file. Although around for decades, it is only fairly recently that it has become mature enough to enter the mainstream. Previously, speech recognition systems had to be "trained" to recognize a particular person's voice even for the most limited applications. Today, the algorithms driving the systems have become sophisticated enough to accept voice commands without training. Some of the more common uses recently include voice commands that drive telephones to do simple tasks; voice commands that help a phone system route calls appropriately; simple data entry; and easy completion of highly structured documents. But the thing that most people think of as true speech recognition – where they can simply talk naturally and have their every word transcribed accurately in real time – still requires a substantial investment in time, effort – and patience.
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