Appurtenant: enhancing completeness and efficiency of bidirectional patient-physician communication using automatic speech recognition

Guisi Ni, Weisong Shi, Prashant Mahajan

Abstract: Optimal patient-physician communication is integral component in the rendering of medical care. Despite the importance of adequate communication, substantial barriers including time constraints, inadequate provider expertise and variation among patients in their ability to provide complete history of illness, exist which do not allow a comprehensive clinical evaluation at the patient's bedside. As governments and the public scrutinize healthcare costs and quality, it is imperative that we develop tools such as speech recognition based support systems that will assist the provider in obtaining a complete history and physical examination. Here we propose a mobile healthcare assistant system, Appurtenant, aiming at improving completeness and efficiency of bidirectional patient-physician communication for less experienced clinicians without interruption and reducing costs of care by ensuring a standardized approach to patient evaluation.