VoiceIt: “Every hospital will have speech recognition infrastructure”

(HealthTech Wire / VoiceIt) – Nuance is among the world’s most influential software companies with 4.5 billion users – half the world’s population. It specialises in data input and information capture by text or speech - improving communication between man and machine. Following its recent acquisitions Nuance have now embarked on their mission across the European healthcare systems. HealthTech Wire picked the brains of Marcel Wassink, the Vice President of Nuance’s EMEA healthcare division, to learn more about the company’s plans for the future of European healthcare.

Published: 10/27/2009

What do you see as the biggest issues in healthcare today?

The core issues in healthcare right now are reducing cost and improving quality. Quality-wise, there are a lot of clinical errors being made. For example, 850,000 adverse events are estimated for UK National Health Service hospitals  every year, of which around half might be avoidable. In Germany, the number of patients affected by medical errors is estimated to be more than 170,000 annually. These errors are partly caused by information not getting through properly.

Documentation costs are also a key issue. For example, we did a study and found the estimated cost of documentation in the UK alone was over £1 billion.

Why is this? It’s because documentation is inefficient.  In the UK, lots of people are still doing dictation on baby tapes, which go through the post. Tapes get lost and damaged.  Doctors spend too much time reporting and secretaries spend too long typing. It’s a critical issue in healthcare to get this process right. Not only will this save significant costs, it will also improve patient service. And, as a company focused on speech recognition, this is where we come in.

A good example is the Vejle County Hospital in Denmark. There, the CEO claims the hospital has improved its overall productivity by 5 – 7% through speech recognition. Without further budget or extra beds, it can treat more patients. This is because doctors spend less time on reporting. Patients, therefore, get discharged quicker. Imagine achieving this across a country - it’s huge!

Nuance has undergone some changes over the last year, including the acquisition of Philips’ speech recognition business. How will these changes benefit your customers and distributors?

At Nuance, we were strong in the primary care market with our desktop product called Dragon Medical and, with Philips Speech Recognition Systems, we acquired a company that was strong in the linguistically-diverse European health sector, and an expert in large scale installations. So we’ve now got a combination of technologies to improve documentation in hospitals and primary care, and our partners can provide their customers with a wider portfolio of solutions.  Nuance has become a truly global powerhouse for speech-enabled clinical documentation.

Has the recession increased the demand for speech recognition?

Most European hospitals are controlled by governments that are pushing for the creation of electronic patient records – this started before the recession.  For example, in the UK, the NHS has put in more than £10 billion to digitise hospitals, starting with radiology. The same is happening in other European countries.

This push towards patient record systems, we believe, is driving the adoption of speech recognition. One of the biggest problems implementing patient record systems is that doctors are put in a strait jacket – they have to fill in patient record forms using a keyboard – it’s a very laborious way of working.

Norway is a good example of how the future of healthcare will go. They have been through three generations of electronic patient record systems already – now they are rolling out speech recognition country-wide. Information input and reporting using speech recognition has become standard in Norway and is even used in medical school. As a result, Oslo’s Telemark hospital (STHF) has reported savings of almost £ 800,000 per year – money that can be reinvested in patient care and safety.

What are your future plans for Nuance Healthcare in Europe?

We have just launched Dragon Medical 10 in France, the UK, Belgium, Netherlands, and Germany. We will be expanding our offering and services to the primary care sector. We will also be advancing our SpeechMagic technology further, including enhanced support for large installations, Citrix, Linux and structured reporting. New integrated modules will be designed to deliver statistical information for measuring efficiency and turnaround times, so that hospitals can instantly assess the costs and benefits of speech recognition.

We will be talking about these developments at the annual Nuance Healthcare Partner Event in Vienna, Austria - coming up this November. This will provide our integration partners from all over the world the chance to update their knowledge about Nuance Healthcare products, but also to express their needs, and share their thoughts about where they think the market is going.

How do you see speech recognition being used in five years' time to change the way health services are delivered?

In five or ten years, all hospitals will use electronic patient record systems. These will become more structured so we can get statistical information from them easily. At the moment, we can’t, because the data is sitting on paper and is virtually unusable.

As for speech recognition, it will continue to be a major help to doctors filling in these structured reports.  The first structured reports will be forms containing radio buttons, drop down menus – they will involve a lot of clicking for doctors. We are already researching ‘talk forms’ – doctors will talk in free narrative and the form will fill in automatically.  We also have to move towards using decision support systems to give immediate feedback to doctors when they make a mistake – at the point of dictation.  Whether that happens over an iPod, a PDA or a mobile phone, it won’t matter – we will be there because in the future, every hospital will have speech recognition infrastructure.

Mr. Wassink, thank you for your time and answers. (HTW)

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Source: HealthTech Wire on behalf of Nuance Communications

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