Speech recognition speeds clinical results

Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust is streamlining procedures and speeding the time taken to produce x-ray results with speech recognition technology.

The radiology department at the Trust was struggling to pace with the reports needed to be produced from a growing number of investigations it carried out on patients.

Professor Philip Gishen, Hammersmith NHS Trust director of imaging said the department had as much a three-month backlog in transcribing the notes made by the radiologist into a report in the investigation carried out on a patient.

"We had 11 stenographers transcribing reports and they were not coping very well with the workload," he said.

Gishen said the department decided to look for a way of automating the reporting procedures when new targets designed to produce same-day investigations or examinations were introduced for ultrasound tests.

"The problem was a common one, where the referring doctors, as well as the radiologists, wanted to get examinations done when they want and need them done," he said. "It was also the same problem that they couldn't get results fast enough."

As a result the department introduced speech recognition technology from specialist Nuance to transcribe the radiologists' notes into reports and so reduce the time taken to produce examination results.

Gishen said the idea met with some initial resistance from clinical staff who were sceptical of the effectiveness of voice recognition technology, but Gishen said work to ensure the Nuance software could recognise specialist vocabulary and synchronise the right x-ray imagery with the right patient record allayed any user fears.

"We told them they would be losing their Dictaphones," he said. "So now they come out of the procedure or examination and the archiving system pulls up the images taken alongside the patient record. The clinician hits a button, records their report, hits another button and the report is ready to review."

Productivity increased to such an extent that when the Nuance speech recognition system was first introduced the productivity of the stenographers jumped from 45.5 per cent of investigation reports within the same day the month before, to 83.8 per cent the month after.

Gishen told IT PRO that now, over three years after its introduction, the department no longer needs stenographers as clinicians use the speech technology to produce all their reports.

He also said the success of speech recognition technology in radiology has opened up avenues for using it in further areas of the Trust, including patient call routing and clinician results services.