Is your Cloud-based Speech Recognition HIPAA Compliant?

Chad Hiner, RN, MS, Executive Director, HealthcareDeveloper, Healthcare Leave a Comment

In today’s complex healthcare environment, clinicians are desperately looking for ways to improve efficiency and decrease the burden of clinical documentation. Speech recognition is gaining in popularity and consumers are now accustomed to speaking instead of typing.

A few words of caution – If you are planning to use a consumer version of speech recognition, to document clinical findings, you will want to consider two things:

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Chad Hiner, RN, MS, Executive Director, Healthcare

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  1. Using Siri® Speech Recognition, included with Apple operating systems, or Google Voice™, included with Google and Android operating systems, to dictate a text message, a brief email or perform a Google search is an efficient, simple and accurate way of completing a task. It is estimated that 50% of smartphone owners use these popular tools on a regular basis. The differences are that Siri and Google Voice do not include a robust medical vocabulary, understand medical context or support the medical syntax required for clinical documentation.
  2. More importantly, consider whether these tools really, provide the degree of protection you really need for Personal Health Information (PHI). They may provide the encryption necessary for HIPAA compliance, but they do not include a Business Associates Agreement(BAA). Under the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, an HIPAA BAA is a contract between an HIPAA-covered entity and an HIPAA business associate (BA). The contract protects PHI in accordance with HIPAA guidelines.

Fortunately, there is a cloud-based speech recognition solution that works with your iPhone or Android phone, conforms to HIPAA requirements of a BAA while providing data encryption, and all the medical vocabulary you need. SayIt™ from nVoq supports all major-medical specialties and is simple and easy to use. One voice profile, encrypted in the cloud, is available to use wherever you have an Internet connection, on a Mac OSX or a Windows based PC.

SayIt is currently being used with Epic®, Cerner®, eClinicalWorks, Athenahealth®, MEDITECH®, GE®, McKesson® and many other EHRs. SayIt is as easy to use as any consumer speech recognition tool: simply place your cursor in a free-text field and dictate your notes, with the assurance that your patient’s data is secure.

Contact us to try SayIt now: sales@nvoq.com or call 720-562-4500.

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