Figure. Stages of Back-End and Front-End Dictation.

There are two 2 primary ways that speech recognition (SR) can assist the clinical documentation process. In back-end SR, clinicians’ dictations, the audio original (AO), are captured and converted to text by an SR engine. The SR-generated text is edited by a professional medical transcriptionist (MT), then sent back to the clinician for review and a signed note (SN). In front-end SR, clinicians dictate directly into free-text fields of the electronic health record and edit the transcription.