Given the choice between searching a computer for a document manually or simply asking it to find it for you, which would you choose?
Chances are, you’d simply ask it to find it for you, and if a development team at Vanderbilt University Medical Center has its way, you’ll soon be able to do just that.
One of the issues at play, here, is that EHRs, among other recent “helpful” technologies, aren’t quite as user-friendly as many providers would like them to be.
But as Dr. Yaa Kumah, assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, put it during the recent The Voice of Healthcare Summit at Harvard Medical School, ““Now as opposed to having to learn how to tell the computer what you want it to do, you can literally tell the computer what you want it to do. That is just amazing and can allow so many more people who don’t have all the tools and resources to interact with a physical keyboard to still get the same benefits.”
It’s Dr. Kumah’s team that piloting the voice search program. As she explained, "Right now, unfortunately, the way our EHRs are laid out, we are pointing and clicking just to find a simple value like a weight. But why? It’s all there. This gets back to the issue of not great design from our EHRs. EHRs are built by people who are technologists, but not necessarily informed by people who are the end users. I know that when I see a person’s A1C it would make sense for me to be able to trend it very easily. But it takes five extra clicks for me to do that natural step. But the information is all there.”
In the new pilot, writes our colleague at MobiHealthNews, “the voice user interface was designed to give the physician information about the patient in a similar fashion that an attending physician would ask information from a resident. Kumah said it’s important for the system to be designed in a workflow familiar to the providers.”
Not surprisingly, there are still some kinks to work out. For example, machines still reply a bit more slowly than most people, and providers are looking for answers ASAP.
“People have expectations about how things are supposed to sound, and when you violate that expectation you end up giving a very bad user experience,” Kumah said.
But despite the remaining challenges, Kumah is betting the final product will be worth it.
As she summed it up, “The argument is that if it takes any less time to say it than to find it, voice wins. It’s an argument that is an easy one to make.”
Another issue in voice is timing. When you speak, on average it takes the other person 200 milliseconds to respond, she said. But that doesn’t always happen in voice technology. It can take a few seconds for the technology to find the information and speak to the user.
“People have expectations about how things are supposed to sound, and when you violate that expectation you end up giving a very bad user experience,” Kumah said.