Voice recognition in clinical medicine: process versus technology.

Large-vocabulary, continuous voice recognition technology, as well as the voice recognition industry, have matured to the point that the available tools are affordable and powerful enough to provide clinicians with an alternative to keyboard data entry. However, use of voice recognition technology in clinical medicine faces several practical process-oriented hurdles that may restrict the use of this technology to certain types of activities. For example, the use of voice recognition technology for dictation raises practical issues of privacy, security, and confidentiality. However, the same economic pressures that forced many clinicians to learn the keyboard instead of relying on a secretary may push clinicians from the keyboard to the microphone.