Doctors' handwriting gone digital: An ethical assessment of voice recognition technology in medicine

The pen, once the instrument of clinical documentation, is yielding to the more efficient technology of computer-assisted voice recognition. With this transition, in place of the quirky handwriting that has long characterized medical practice, electronic medical documents supply readable and detailed, yet imperfect, text. Technology has not fully solved the problem of medical error but has, in some ways, magnified it. The ethical dimensions of physician-to-computer communication raise questions regarding moral responsibility at the interface of mind and machine.