LONDON, UK - (HealthTech Wire / News) - Nuance Communications, Inc., a leading supplier of speech solutions, today announced that Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trusts (LTHT) has achieved a reporting rate from imaging of 98% following the introduction of speech recognition, which represents an increase of 48% over the previous workflow.
- Reduction of the average report turnaround time from 5.5 days to 2.1 days within the first six months.
- Secretarial staff devote more hours to consultant support and patient care.
- "Speech recognition solution is particularly attuned to medical terminology which really improves accuracy of the report, and speed."
“The major benefit of the system has to be turnaround time. Within the first six months, we had reduced the average report turnaround time from 5.5 days to 2.1 days,” says Lynne Gathercole, Radiology IT Systems Manager at LTHT. “The speech recognition system has allowed us to save money by reducing the use of external agency secretaries. Previously, we were outsourcing some of the transcribing for our basic radiology reports to these secretarial agencies. It has also freed up time for our fulltime secretarial staff, allowing them to devote more hours to consultant support and ultimately patient care.”
Nuance speech recognition has been brought to LTHL as an integral part of the Soliton Workflow Solution, provided by the Nuance integration partner Soliton IT. The Trust has 175 concurrent system licences in its radiology departments; including radiologists, reporting radiographers and ultra-sonographers.
Dr. Philip Robinson, Consultant Radiologist and Head of PACS, LTHT says: “Speech recognition has been very helpful in our poly-trauma cases, where different radiology specialists examine different areas of the body. Previously, a secretary had to coordinate each of these reports into one final report, which then needed to be validated by each specialist. Now we just have to dictate the part of the report relevant to us, verify this and pass it on the next specialist. This really improves speed, and allows all clinicians dealing with the poly-trauma case quick access to the final report.”
“From a user perspective, I find that the speech recognition solution is particularly attuned to medical terminology which really improves accuracy of the report, and speed,” Dr. Philip Robinson says. “It ignores the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ that may confuse the medical secretaries. You can instantly modify and validate your report online while it’s fresh in your mind. You don’t have to revisit it, and deal with any blanks or question marks from secretarial transcriptions you may receive up to a week later.”
Dr. Robinson also finds the auto-text codes to be very useful: “Rather than repeating an entire paragraph about the type of radiology examination that took place, I can just put in a code, which fills this in. I produce my reports by doing everything on my own. I don’t need to involve the secretary at all.”
Doctors at LTHL work with Nuance’s SpeechMagic integration platform.
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Source: Nuance Communications Inc.
