Kingston latest London hospital to go live with speech recognition

Published: 10/21/2009

LONDON, UK – (HealthTech Wire / News) - Kingston Hospital NHS Trust is one of the latest London hospitals to go live with a reporting solution integrating a speech recognition system from Nuance Communications, Inc.

The SOLITON Workflow Manager system powered by Nuance speech recognition will be used in the pathology and radiology departments.

Soliton IT, a long-time integration partner of Nuance Healthcare, won the contracts to install Workflow Manager at Kingston Hospital, and Queen Mary’s Hospital Roehampton, in June this year. Soliton IT Director, Bob Watson, says he’s delighted about the two new contracts and the seamless go live.

“Momentum is growing for SOLITON speech recognition and workflow in the London area”, he says. “We now have 10 implementations in London. Radiology is a fairly small community so we’re getting word-of-mouth recommendations.”

Dr Sarah Evans, Clinical Lead in radiology at Kingston Hospital, highlights integration capability as a key success factor.

“We are delighted with Soliton’s Workflow Manager. Everyone has found it easy to use and appreciates its superior seamless integration capabilities with RIS and PACS,” she says.

Kingston and Queen Mary’s join eight London hospitals already running SOLITON Workflow Manager – St George’s Hospital, University Hospital Lewisham, Royal Free Hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital, North Middlesex Hospital, the Whittington Hospital, Queen’s Hospital and King George Hospital.

Research by Great Ormond Street Hospital, which installed Workflow Manager two years ago, shows speech recognition has delivered major time savings. 85% of radiology reports are now available within 24 hours.

“The benefits of integrated speech recognition are massive: it improves turnaround times, workflow and efficiency,” says Bob Watson.

Radiologists and pathologists at Kingston use speech recognition to dictate, create and edit clinical reports in real time. Clinicians can also boost their productivity by moving easily and efficiently between reports using Workflow Manager – minimising mouse and button clicks.

Real time report preparation and an integrated workflow is not only faster, but also safer, Bob Watson says.

“There is an improvement in diagnostic safety, because with close integration you know the diagnostic images you are looking at correspond to the patient data you are viewing,” he says.

Workflow Manager is fully integrated with Kingston’s iSoft RIS, Sectra PACS, and Clinisys Labs system. Across the other eight in London it is running on RIS, PACS and Lab systems supplied by Philips, Sectra, Siemens, iSoft, Cerner and Clinisys. Soliton IT software with Nuance speech recognition is also compatible with most other legacy systems.

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Source: HealthTech on behalf of Nuance Communications & Soliton IT