The adoption of new technology in health care often produces unintended consequences, which can be mitigated by applying human factors engineering principles to user interface design. Due to efficiency gains, the use of speech recognition technology among physicians has grown in recent years. Investigators analyzed notes dictated by emergency medicine physicians and found that 71% of the notes contained errors. Given that 15% of the errors were considered critical, the authors suggest speech recognition technology may create miscommunication that could adversely affect patient care.