Speech Recognition betters the HIT, says Philips

 

 According to Nick van Terheyden, Chief Medical Officer at Philips Speech Recognition Systems, the implementation of enterprise level Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) systems, such as EMR applications, promises to provide more cost-effective care in the future.

 A quote from the CMO, at the 2008 The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Conference.
“Speech recognition can reduce costs by 30 to 40 percent, and early users will have a very high competitive advantage.”
{HIMSS is the healthcare industry's membership organization focused on optimal useage of healthcare information technology}

 Moreover, By bolstering speech recognition with Natural language Processing, then interfacing to language engines with mapping capabilities - "Not only are transcription costs reduced using speech recognition, but even more importantly next-generation speech recognition tools will allow clinicians to interact with medical standards even before a dictation is complete, says Mike Levy, Chief Medical Officer of Health Language Inc.

 This is impressive - almost real-time, quasi-interactive speech recognition..

 Says Mr. Levy: "For example during the patient encounter, the clinician could dictate into the SR system and be presented with pertinent information such as: decision support including drug information and drug interaction checking; clinical pathways to provide the latest evidence-based information about treating diseases; patient information such as handouts that can be given to the patient at the point of care; order sets such as recommended medications, tests, labs, and other orders pertinent to the patient; and suggested billing codes".

 Says Mr. van Terheyden of Philips:
“Speech recognition and natural language understanding bridges the gap between clinicians and technology.”

 

Speech recognition's accuracy better than human transcription..

 

 Welcome news for speech recognition proponents!

 HealthImaging.com (a site for Healthcare IT professionals) posted a news article yesterday, December 13, about a presentation at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA)'s annual meeting last month, documenting that the reports which were manually transcribed by humans, showed higher error rates than the reports that were transcribed through speech recognition!

 John Floyd, MD a partner in the 24-member Radiology Consultants of Iowa (RCI), reported “The rate for significant errors, requiring the preparation of an addendum, was 0.6 percent for speech recognition and 2 percent for traditional transcription.”

 Floyd also noted speech recognition significantly increased his firm's efficiency: "Separate data for this practice indicated that average turn-around time for traditional transcription was greater than 24 hours while that for speech recognition was less than one hour.."

 Dr. Floyd further confirmed that the accuracy rate for speech recognition reported by his group was independently verified by 3rd party analysis, conducted at one of the hospitals his partnership services.

 In an On10Net blog post, Bill Crounse MD, Healthcare Industry Director for Microsoft Corporation predicted earlier this year that speech recognition would open up new vistas in the healthcare industry..

 We're pleased to see his predictions coming true!