Medway moves to voice recognition

Medway NHS Foundation Trust has worked with MediTalk to introduce voice recognition software to its radiology department to reduce what were three day turn-around times for reports.

The company advised the trust on a speech recognition package, and it is now using TalkingPoint, an integrated workflow system developed by GHG Software Developments, with Nuance’s Dragon Medical speech recognition software.

TalkingPoint acts as an “intermediary” between Dragon and the trust’s its radiology and picture archiving and communications systems.

It has enabled the trust to move to using speech recognition to produce reports, which were previously produced by medical secretaries, who transcribed dictated notes.

“We are now reducing our turnaround times from three days to 12 hours maximum, which is obviously improving efficiency,” said Martin Mitchell, head of MRI at Medway Maritime Hospital.

The radiology department at Medway produces more than 14,000 reports a month. TalkingPoint allows users to prioritise certain tasks, alerting colleagues in the process. It also includes shortcuts that users to customise report templates and scripting.

“Staff can create an alert if they can see something urgent needs to be done. They can write a memo on the report if there needs to be an urgent referral and this will alert the admin and clerical team,” Mitchell told eHealth Insider.

The implementation of the system coincided with an administrative and clerical staff restructuring process. Mitchell emphasised that this involved no job losses, since typists we reassigned roles elsewhere in the office.

The decision to invest in TalkingPoint was taken after trust representatives visited Milton Keynes NHS Trust, which is already using it. Once the decision was made, the package was implemented within two months.

Mitchell was given responsibility for the project as in-house lead. MediTalk completed the first stage of training, after which he was responsible for training 30 staff members who currently use the system.

The contract, which is renewed annually, is worth £8,000 annually, a figure which covers the maintenance cost for each member of staff.