Thursday, July 05, 2007

Is Speech Recognition a Kickback???

Image credit: http://www.jd-associates.com.au/author/garrydisher

I wish I had come up with this myself, but instead, this comes from one of the many brilliant folks that peruse this blog and otherwise correspond with yours truly. My colleague has suffered through a forced implementation of SR, and notes the following:

Do you know if anyone has ever tried to construe the adoption of voice recognition technology as a kickback to the hospital in violation of federal antikickback statutes? It would seem to me that transcription services are traditionally provided for free by the hospital to hospital-based physicians (except of course the cardiologists and administrators don’t have to use it!) and that the cost of transcription is covered by the technical fee collected by the hospital. In essence we are providing free services to the hospital in return for a hospital contract. I wonder what the lawyers would say.

So do I.

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