Newsbytes
September 2025—In his previous role as a pathologist at Seattle’s Virginia Mason Medical Center, Dick Hwang, MD, PhD, was looking for a way to make his life—and his colleagues’ lives—easier. So he reached for something he hadn’t used in a while: his doctorate in computational biology. It was 2014, and Virginia Mason’s pathology group had just rolled out M*Modal Fluency Direct speech-recognition software as an optional tool for dictating diagnostic data. Dr. Hwang and many of his colleagues embraced the new software, but they soon realized that it meant they’d be spending a lot of time editing and formatting data. Entering a final diagnosis required, for example, typing “1.{tab}{caps lock},” dictating “cecum and ascending colon comma polypectomy,” then typing “:{caps lock}{return}{backspace}A.{tab}”—just as a start.