Speech Recognition Reduces Turnaround Time of Radiology Reporting by 85%

A new speech recognition system offers front-end dictation possibilities for radiologists to easily produce and distribute authorized reports after-hours and during weekends.

Nuance Communications, Inc. (Burlington, MA, USA), a supplier of speech solutions, reported that its speech recognition technology has been utilized by the Nuance partner SolitonIT to reduce the time needed to create radiology reports, at the department of medical imaging, Nambour General Hospital (QLD, Australia), by 85%.

"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 six to seven days to be produced,” explained David Ward, director of 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 33 hours, now it is decreased to five hours. Together with the speech recognition technology, SolitonIT has delivered a fully integrated environment that links together key elements within the imaging department, the radiology information system (RIS) and the picture archiving and communication system (PACS). Workflow is far more efficient and risk of error has been minimized. "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 demoralizing,” remarked 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. SolitonIT's workflow solution utilizes the award winning Nuance speech recognition, SpeechMagic. An HL7 [Health Level 7] interface to the RIS and full desktop integration to the hospital's PACS means that it is now virtually impossible for transcriptionists to type the wrong report for the wrong patient, explained David Ward.

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. 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,” said David Ward.

Physicians at Nambour Hospital work with the solution that SolitonIT deployed, which includes Nuance's SpeechMagic platform.

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