Is your Cloud-based Speech Recognition HIPAA Compliant?
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 the obvious answer, but you need the right solution.
If you are planning to use a consumer version of speech recognition to document clinical findings, you will want to consider two things:
- 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 smart phone 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.
- More importantly, consider whether these tools really provide the degree of protection you 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, a HIPAA BAA is a contract between a HIPAA-covered entity and a HIPAA business associate (BA). The contract protects PHI in accordance with HIPAA guidelines.
- Several speech recognition vendors have recently discontinued or plan to discontinue support for older software. It’s important to keep up-to-date and to utilize a supported speech recognition solution for use in a HIPAA-compliant environment. Using an unsupported speech recognition solution could present a security risk. As such, upgrading unsupported solutions to a more modern speech recognition solution is critical to maintaining HIPAA compliance.
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. Dolbey’s Fusion Narrate®, powered by 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.
Fusion Narrate is currently being used with Epic®, Cerner®, eClinicalWorks, Athenahealth®, MEDITECH®, GE®, McKesson® and many other EHRs. Fusion Narrate 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.
Searching for speech recognition software?
Start recording your dictations accurately with our easy-to-use platform, Fusion Narrate.