SayIt: The HIPAA Compliant, Cloud-based Speech API

Kyle O'Donnell, Healthcare Sales SpecialistCustomer Care, Developer, Healthcare, Partner Leave a Comment

The Challenge: Convenience Vs. Compliance

Clinical documentation is a necessity to comply with various government, regulatory, and health entities, all of which rely on accurate patient and health industry data. These government mandates and regulatory bodies set strict health initiatives and require that data be handled in a secure manner.
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Kyle O'Donnell, Healthcare Sales Specialist

The popularity of consumer-oriented applications like Siri and Alexa has greatly increased awareness of and comfort with speech recognition solutions as a big time-saver. Therefore, it’s not surprising that many clinicians are turning to these same offerings to capture clinical narratives. However, there are three major concerns with this approach:

  1. HIPAA compliance and security. These consumer applications typically will NOT comply with HIPAA requirements and do not include a Business Associates Agreement (BAA).
  2. Lack of medical terminology including drug databases.
  3. Lack of assurance that data will not be utilized by the “free” solution provider for its own commercial purposes.

Healthcare application developers and IT leaders want to give their customers the ease of use and time savings they’ve come to expect from consumer-oriented speech recognition while avoiding the above pitfalls. Fortunately, with the nVoq platform, no tradeoff is required! Here are some of the ways developers are embracing convenience without compromise.

1. Add an Android Dictation Keyboard to your Tablet application
For mobile health workers needing timely and accurate documentation turnaround, the nVoq Android Dictation Keyboard can be easily bundled as a client overlay app or integrated via APIs.

2. Provide a front-end option for medical transcriptionists
Many medical transcription organizations are being asked to provide “real time” or “front end” alternatives for their customers to reduce documentation turnaround time. However, doctors often just want to dictate their narratives and move on to the next patient, so they still value having someone else do the editing and posting of text behind the scenes. With the nVoq platform APIs, a simple intake application for mobile phone or desktop can be built to create an immediate draft for editing by the transcriptionist and review by the clinician – saving processing cost and improving response time.

3. Voice-Power Specialty Workflows with Precision – Even Handsfree
With the nVoq platform, developers of specialty applications like radiology, pathology or cardiology can be confident they have the most relevant and accurate industry vocabulary and “language models” available to support their disciplines, including complex medical terms. By contrast, consumer speech offerings typically are based on conversational English. Add support for dictation of assessment and plans, or use voice commands to navigate without typing and complete complex templates in seconds vs. minutes

For vendors faced with adding speech into a complex legacy systems base, the nVoq holistic API approach does not require use of a separate language-based SDK, greatly simplifying the integration process.

Wondering how you can get started with integrating speech? Follow our link to nVoq’s API documentation: http://support.nvoq.com/api

Test our engine yourself here: https://eval.nvoq.com/webdictation/

Just choose your medical specialty and go!

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