Feb 25, 2006
********************************************************

The human "transcriber"

********************************************************
Dear friends,

With all the frenzied activity happenings in the voice-to-text conversion
arena, and the vulnerability this nurtures amongst medical transcription
practitioners and business owners, I felt it to be appropriate to reprint
from an editorial dated Sep 03, 2000, at MTIndia:

Sound is processed in the auditory cortex, right above your ear.
The memory of sound is stored in the auditory association area,
which occupies most of the sides of your head. It's here that words
and sounds are stored. (Just read on....this gets interesting!)

Strategically located where auditory association meets visual
association is Wernicke's area, the spot where objects are named.
When you hear of a patient with "polyuria, polydipsia, polyphagia",
with hyperglycemia, and the doctor mumbles s/l **di....
..ourpathy**, it's Wernicke that whispers, "Diabetic Neuropathy,
stupid." Wernicke is the king of nouns.

At the other end of auditory association lies Broca's area, a
powerful extension of auditory association into the motor
association cortex. The motor association cortex is the center of all
physical action and Broca's area the center of action words.
Broca energetically generates verbs, enthusiastically constructs
sentences, and anxiously anticipates what others are about to say.
Vision and "vision words" happen at the back of the skull, action
and action words happen at the front, in Broca's area, right next
to the prefrontal cortex. The ear is right in the middle, the key
to everything.

An electronic ear, or a microphone as some nerds call it, can
never ever be as sensitive as a human ear. Whatever be the
speed of software development, WERNICKE AND BROCA
areas are unlikely to be electronically replaced in this century!

The human MT is here to stay for some time:)

I do not blame you for your fears, I had the same reservations
before I had really entered this field! I will quote a friend:

"As a practicing radiologist, I and my colleagues have seriously
studied the options. MedSpeak, IBM ViaVoice, and Dragon Systems
Naturally Speaking are the major packages. I personally own
ViaVoice and Dragon. They are pretty good, reaching up to 95-98%
accuracy at normal speaking speeds, but that 2% error rate kills
you! In practice, I am slamming out my dictations way too fast for
the system to work, and the American transcriptionist, even though
she (mostly females) makes more than the Indian, she makes a lot
less than the American physician, so her time spent transcribing is
less expensive to the group than my time spent meticulously
correcting the small errors the speech recognition systems make.
Also, I can use "meta-language" like "Start with a normal standard
CT Chest and add that there is a 2cm nodule in the lateral segment
of the middle lobe." and she will produce the whole report
properly. Or, "go back to where I said left subclavian and change
it to right" and she figures it out. The key to making Indian
transcription work is to make it thoroughly responsive. The
American transcriptionist does a lot of "back-office" work in
addition to just turning speech into text. Sometimes the charge
codes are wrong. They take care of all that for me, so I can just
interpret scans at full speed. They format and deliver the work.
They call me if they don't understand a word, or if a transcription
gets cut off. A good American agent, and tight telecommunications
is key. BTW The Indian grammer and word choice is sometimes
very strange to the American ear. Watch lots of American TV!"

*We learn from history that we do not learn from history.*

Cheers!

Maj (Dr) Amit Chatterjee, SM
Strategist / Founder ~ mailto:amit@...
MT India ~ www.mtindia.org
"The Community of MT Professionals"

********************************************************
NEWS AND VIEWS :
*****************
1) Elsevier Launches MT Toolbox

Cadmus Communications Corporation has announced that Elsevier is launching a
new electronic access to its medical transcription reference service using
Cadmus' QLU desktop access application. By offering content through QLU
(Quick LookUp), the publisher provides its subscription base with search
capabilities and instant access to up-to-date versions of the suite of
Elsevier medical reference titles included in their MT Toolbox offering.

By moving the reference sources from the library bookshelf to the user's
desktops, the MT Toolbox powered by QLU can improve the speed at which MTs
can work. QLU also enables publishers to offer trial subscriptions for
conversion to paid subscriptions using a built-in ecommerce engine. In
addition, QLU manages subscription expirations to increase renewal rates and
revenues compared to print and CD-ROM distribution models. QLU is designed
to enhance product development with usage tracking and a reporting tool as
well as enabling revenue growth with contextual and rich-media advertising
opportunities for publications.

http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=15129

2) Alden Prepress to expand in medical transcription

Alden Prepress Services Pvt Limited, a subsidiary of Alden Group, UK, is
planning to expand its activities in medical transcription and related BPO
fields to cash in on the medical transcription outsourcing boom.

The company, which is into typesetting operations, expects substantial
growth in medical transcription segment in the near future. It has received
three big tenders from UK hospitals in the last few weeks and expects to bag
more deals as UK hospitals are looking to outsource such services as part of
cost-cutting measures, a company release said.

Alden has been doing medical transcription works mostly for US market over
the last 12 months. The company plans to increase its headcount for medical
transcription services from the present 20 to 200 by the end of this year.

With more prepress jobs for STM (scientific, technical and medical) journals
being outsourced to India by the US and European publishers, he said Chennai
operations would take up the lead in expanding Alden's global operations.
However, with competition to access talented labour, Alden said, 'we are
also victims of our own success and the labour market in Chennai, especially
in BPO markets, is overheated. We experience salary inflation and high
attrition rates.'

http://www.business-standard.com/common/storypage.php?storyflag=y&leftnm=lmnu1&l\
eftindx=1&lselect=1&chklogin=N&autono=216411

3) Nuance to Buy Dictaphone for $357 Million

Speech recognition-software maker Nuance Communications Inc. said Wednesday
it will buy Dictaphone for $357 million, enabling Nuance to expand further
into the $15 billion global market for health care transcription services.
Stratford, Conn.-based Dictaphone will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary
of Nuance, which is financing the all-cash deal with a $355 million loan and
a $75 million credit line.

The deal is the latest in a series of acquisitions for Burlington-based
Nuance to gain a bigger piece of the market to convert doctors' recorded
dictation about patients and other medical data into electronic transcripts.

Last spring, Peabody-based ScanSoft Inc. agreed to acquire its former speech
recognition rival Nuance for $221 million, and operate under the name of
Nuance, which had been based in Menlo Park, Calif.

Dictaphone traces its roots to a company formed in the late 1800s by
telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, and says it now provides dictation
and transcription services to more than 4,000 medical centers with about
400,000 doctors.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/fn/3645511.html

4) Voice Recognition And Medical Transcription

As you already know, doctors are busy people. This is never more obvious
then when they're dictating their notes. It's understandable they're busy,
and as their MT, I can surely forgive them but will the latest voice
recognition software be as forgiving as me? Not likely.

As a transcriptionist you will have typed through background noise, patients
moaning, doctors eating their lunch, personal conversations (oops they
forgot the recorder was on) and other incomprehensible noise. Not to
mention, ESL doctors with heavy accents and very tired ER doctors after a
long shift!

At this time there is no voice recognition software which can handle this
type of voice recognition. It is impossible for the software to determine
actual speech from mistakes in conversation, background noise, heavy
accents, etc.

http://www.dailyindia.com/show/1311.php

5) MedQuist Announces Appointment of Jouko Karvinen to its Board of
Directors

MedQuist Inc. announced the appointment of Jouko Karvinen as a member of its
board of directors effective February 2, 2006. Mr. Karvinen brings a breadth
of management experience and substantial knowledge of the healthcare
industry to the MedQuist board.

Mr. Karvinen has served as the Chief Executive Officer of Philips Medical
Systems since October 2002. Since Mr. Karvinen assumed this role, the
division has consistently improved the profitability and accelerated time to
market of new products and systems. Philips Medical Systems now holds a
leading position in the global healthcare imaging, monitoring, information
and services market, and is the market leader in the majority of the
businesses it serves.

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&ne\
wsId=20060208005898&newsLang=en

6) Keltron to conduct diploma course in Medical Transcription

The public-sector Keltron will conduct a six-month diploma course in Medical
Transcription. Those who successfully complete the course with the
prescribed scores would be considered for placement on contract basis at the
Keltron Medical Transcription Centre. Admission to the course will be on the
basis of a screening test.

Candidates have to pay fee of Rs.250 along with the application. The test
will be conducted in Thiruvananthapuram. The course fee is Rs.15,000. The
minimum qualification for admission to the course is graduation degree with
basic computer knowledge. There is no age limit.

Application forms can be obtained from Keltron Coordinators in the Deputy
Collector (Election) offices in all District Collectorates, IDCP, Keltron
Equipment Complex, Karakulam, Thiruvananthapuram 695 564. The form can also
be downloaded from www.keltron.org.

http://www.hindu.com/2006/01/22/stories/2006012211770400.htm

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
P. S. Would you like to share this newsletter with your friends
or post it on your site? Please do! But also be sure to read
below:

All original content of this newsletter is © Copyright 1998-2006
Mediweb Infotech Pvt. Ltd. All cited articles are copyright of
their authors and/or respective publications. Please feel free to
share this newsletter with your friends or post it on your site
as long as it is left intact with all links unchanged and this
notice.

Thank you for your interest in MT India!

The MTIndia Team
----------------------------------------------------------------
Please DO NOT reply to this mail id to unsubscribe