Taking notes and recording a patient’s medical history is something that doctors do as it helps them keep tracking of the patient’s health, allergies, what medicine they’ve been given, and so on. However taking down notes and writing up reports can be tedious work, as we imagine most reports are, but Google wants to help with that.According to Google, “Good documentation helps create good clinical care by communicating a doctor’s thinking, their concerns, and their plans to the rest of the team. Unfortunately, physicians routinely spend more time doing documentation than doing what they love most — caring for patients.”
To solve that, the company has recently announced that they’ll be running a pilot program in which it will utilize voice recognition technology to help transcribe doctor and patient visits. They have built automatic speech recognition models that are capable of handling multiple speaker conversations, meaning that it can separate the voices of the doctor and the patient.
Of course this does raise some privacy concerns, such as whether patients want to be identified or not. However this pilot program will only proceed when patients have given their consent and they will also be de-identified to further help protect their privacy. Whether or not this tool will be useful and will be widely adopted across the medical field remains to be seen, but that’s what Google is trying to find out.