Philips SpeechMagic Advanced launched in Finland

Royal Philips Electronics has released its speech recognition-based report management software, Philips SpeechMagic Executive Advanced (SMEA), in Finland.

The software is to be made available to Finnish hospitals, in order to help speed up the availability of medical reports and information.

SMEA can operate as a stand-alone application or as an integrated system. The Finnish version will use a Finnish resource known as MultiMed ConText, to ensure it can understand specialised terminology from all departments including surgery, internal medicine, gynaecology, neurology, psychiatrics and pulmonology.

Finnish vendor, Oy Konttorityö, will fit the application into hospitals across the country enabling them to call up documents using speech recognition and instantly add information into the file. This will later be verified by administrative staff.

The technology is currently being piloted at the Northern Ostrobothnia Hospital District, which is using SMEA in its surgery unit.

Kari Haukipuro, head of surgery at the hospital, said: “Using speech recognition, a dictation is done immediately after the operation – exactly the same way as before. The text is sent to a transcriptionist for review, although in future surgeons can also take care of the correction themselves. Due to this it is possible to improve the quality of dictations and eliminate unnecessary report creation phases.”

Lääkäriasema Pulssi Oy, one of the five biggest private clinics in Finland, has also introduced SMEA In radiology.

“Using SpeechMagic Executive Advanced instead of manual typing saves radiologists significant working time,” said Timo Kolu, the director of the clinic’s imaging centre.

Philips say this latest deal makes it the only company to provide healthcare speech recognition software to the major Nordic countries, including Finland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden.

“The Helsinki University Central Hospital released figures that show an improvement in report turnaround time by up to 78 percent,” said Björn Aune, regional director Nordics for Philips Speech Recognition Systems.

“With speech recognition, reports are available instantly to physicians as well as their patients, hereby supporting faster decisions on further treatment,” she added.

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Philips Speech Recognition Systems