Nuance speech recognition reduces turn around time of radiology reporting at Nambour Hospital by 85%

System to be presented at RADaim 2010 (Gold Coast, 23-25 July) and RANZCR ASM (Perth, 14-17 October)

Published: 07/23/2010

NAMBOUR, QLD, AUSTRALIA - (HealthTech Wire / News) -  Nuance Communications, Inc., a leading supplier of speech solutions, today announced that its speech recognition technology has been utilised by the Nuance partner SolitonIT to reduce the time needed to create radiology reports, at the Department of Medical Imaging, Nambour General Hospital, Queensland, Australia, by 85%. Soliton IT will showcase the speech recognition system at the RADaim 2010 conference starting today (Conrad Jupiters, Gold Coast – Booth 8). Later this year, the solution will also be presented at the annual meeting of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists in Perth (14-17 October – Booth 27).

“Public radiology in Queensland is faced with a shortage of Radiologists to do the reporting; which had led to significant delays in our report turnaround times. In the past, some reports would take 6-7 days to be produced”, explains David Ward, Director - Medical Imaging Services, Southern Cluster, Sunshine Coast - Wide Bay Health Service District.

The average report turnaround time, before the implementation of speech recognition at Nambour Hospital, was at thirty-three hours, today it is down to five hours. Together with the Speech Recognition technology, Soliton IT has delivered a fully integrated environment that links together key elements within the imaging department, the Radiology Information System and the

Picture Archiving and Communication System. Workflow is far more efficient and risk of error has been minimised. “Previously the transcriptionists were constantly fighting with a backlog of audio files waiting to be typed. They never had a sense of achievement. They left on Friday evening, knowing that on Monday morning the report backlog would have further increased. It was demoralising”, says David Ward. “Thanks to an integrated workflow and speech recognition our Transcriptionists are much happier people.”

Centrally installed and managed at Nambour General Hospital, the system was quickly expanded to give Radiologists at Caloundra and Gympie Hospitals access to speech recognition.

Reducing Risk

Soliton IT’s workflow solution utilises the award winning Nuance speech recognition, SpeechMagic. An HL7 interface to the Radiology Information System (RIS) and full desktop integration to the hospital’s  Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) means that it is now virtually impossible for Transcriptionists to type the wrong report for the wrong patient, explains David Ward: “The solution Soliton IT has delivered sees the image, report and patient file as a single unit, minimising the risks of mixing them up through human error.”

Nuance speech recognition learns and adapts to the users. Recognition accuracy is constantly being improved and a site-specific vocabulary and ConText is continuously updated. The system also offers frontend dictation possibilities for radiologists to easily produce and distribute authorised reports after-hours and during weekends.

“We have a number of young radiologists who embraced the speech recognition-enabled reporting system and encouraged others to come on board. We didn’t have any acceptance problems”, says David Ward.

Doctors at Nambour Hospital work with the solution that SolitonIT deployed which includes Nuance’s SpeechMagic platform.

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Source: Soliton IT and Nuance