Key transcription trends for healthcare market revealed

Steve Newton
Steve Newton

A new report has identified the growing use of voice recognition software by healthcare professionals and confirmed that the cloud is becoming the de facto delivery mechanism for such solutions.

The report, entitled ‘Medical Transcription Software: Europe Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast, 2022-2029’, has been produced by the respected research company Fortune Business Insights and it makes for very interesting reading.

It explains how COVID-19 has accelerated the adoption of digital tools within healthcare, and specifically increased the demand for medical transcription software and services. This is largely down to the increase in telemedicine services resulting from the pandemic that require a considerable amount of supporting documentation and records. Medical transcription software was needed to help physicians manage their administrative workload so that they could focus on providing better patient care.

The figures show that the voice recognition segment dominated the Europe medical transcription software market in 2021. The segment accounted for a 63.6% share of the market in 2021, compared with 36.4% for voice capture.

The primary reasons for this move to AI powered recognition solutions include:

  • The costs incurred by traditional transcription services are higher due to the need to hire transcriptionists or use third party transcription service providers.
  • The turnaround time is higher for traditional transcription service (around 24 hours) compared with voice recognition transcription solutions.
  • There is a growing focus on the automation of all processes involved in clinical documentation.

It’s also interesting to compare the cloud versus on-premise approaches to delivering transcription services. The 2021 market figures showed that the cloud/web-based approach dominated with 77.5% of the total market and that this figure is likely to rise to 82.9% of the market by 2029.

The projected growth of both approaches is quite staggering. For example, the cloud/web-based segment is forecast to increase from US$435.9 million in 2021 to US$1,454.2 million in 2029. Meanwhile the smaller on-premises/installed segment in the Europe medical transcription software market is likely to increase from US$126.4 million in 2021 to US$299.4 million by 2029.

And when it comes to who is using the various transcription services, the answer is very clearly clinicians and radiologists who between them accounted for around 73% of the total end user figures.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the risk of cyber-attacks was cited as the factor most likely to impact market growth. The fact that clinical documentation systems are typically connected to some other type of network was of particular concern as this may make them more vulnerable to cyber-attacks, leading in turn to the potential hacking of private patient information.

The overall message from the report is that medical transcription software is clearly getting bigger and better, and the growing importance of clinical documentation in healthcare is only likely to propel the market growth even faster.

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