Philips SpeechMagic helps the Children’s Hospital at Westmead get children back to the playground faster

Speech recognition technology speeds reporting to help shorten children’s stay at Australian hospital

Published: 08/21

VIENNA, AUSTRIA - (HealthTech Wire) - Royal Philips Electronics (AEX: PHI, NYSE: PHG) announced today that its industrial grade speech recognition technology SpeechMagic has been successfully deployed at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead (CHW), New South Wales, Australia. The technology has helped the radiology and nuclear medicine departments to boost their efficiency, thus moving from a two-week reporting backlog to same-day reporting. With speech recognition powered reporting, physicians are now able to focus on getting the children out of the hospital faster, as treatment delays from missing documentation have been eliminated.

The radiology and nuclear medicine departments of the 340 bed Children’s Hospital at Westmead produce some 55,000 reports each year. Before implementing SpeechMagic, they had been suffering from a distinct backlog of information that could delay the availability of medical information up to two weeks.

K.C. Fan, chief radiographer at CHW said: “Now all reports are finalized at the end of the same day on which they were created. Our two week backlog vanished and the accuracy of our reports has increased, as the secretaries can now spend more time on each report and improve the quality of their work. This provides obvious benefits for the children in our care.”

The Children’s Hospital at Westmead is using background speech recognition which means that the clinicians record their dictations on a PC and the recorded audio file is transferred from there to the SpeechMagic engine. The automatically generated text is then sent to transcriptionists, who review it and correct recognition errors if needed.

“It is a small investment compared to other infrastructural measures, but it makes an enormous improvement to the performance of a department. It makes our entire workflow faster, easier and adds significant value for the physicians,” said Fan.

Other departments in the hospital have now started to investigate how they could benefit from the implementation of speech recognition as well.

Project Speech, the SpeechMagic integration partner for the Australasian region, advised on and implemented speech recognition at CHW.  Philips’ industrial grade speech recognition technology SpeechMagic is installed at more than 8,000 professional sites in 45 nations, including the world’s largest healthcare speech recognition site.