DocPal: A Voice-based EHR Assistant for Health Practitioners

Electronic health record (EHR) systems have been widely adopted across healthcare organizations. While there are many benefits of using EHR such as improved accessibility and secure sharing of patient data, a shortcoming is that its manual data input is time-consuming and error prone. Physicians spend as much as 49.2% of their office time on EHR. In this paper, we present the design, development, and evaluation of a voice-based assistant, DocPal, to assist healthcare practitioners to access and update EHR through their voice. User survey and experimental evaluation illustrate that DocPal has good usability, time efficiency, and accuracy. When applied in the healthcare industry, we expect it to reduce data entry time and provide better patient care.