France and Spain gain the first region-wide speech recognition systems

Castilla-La Mancha’s regional healthcare service (SESCAM) will implement speech recognition in all its radiology departments. This introduction is within the framework of project ‘Ykonos’, an initiative supported by the European Union, which aims to develop and introduce a digital image-based diagnosis system. The third phase of the Ykonos project draws upon 8.5 million euros and includes the installation of equipment for the digitisation, storage and display of radiology images, as well as a series of support services. 

According to Ambrosio Rodriguez, IT director at SESCAM, Ykonos will enable physicians to share and access medical patient information without delay, ensuring faster and more efficient quality of care. By capturing this information through a speech recognition system, physicians have a powerful tool that improves clinical documentation, as it facilitates the immediate and complete availability of a patient’s documents.

The Paris hospital network Assistance Publique - Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP) will also implement speech recognition integrated with the digital dictation workflow solution DictaPlus 5. Gérard Canadas, managing director of DictaPlus France, said that, when the installation period ends in 2010, Paris will have the world’s most advanced document creation system in healthcare and also the world’s largest deployment of hospital-wide in-house speech recognition, involving over 12,000 physicians, 4,000 medical secretaries, and 39 hospitals.

AP-HP aims to achieve a significant drop in report turnaround time, as experienced by the Hôpital Européen Georges-Pompidou, which is also part of the network. Using speech recognition in its radiology department, the hospital has reduced the turnaround time for medical reports from four days to a few hours.

Robert Thornton, commercial director at Philips Speech Recognition explained: ‘Modern speech-recognition technology provides industrial-grade features, specifically designed to facilitate large-scale implementations in the healthcare sector.’ He sees the current region-wide implementations as clear proof of the healthcare sector’s commitment to increased efficiency and accuracy of medical documentation for better quality of care and improved patient service.

Philips recently announced the new version of SpeechMagic - which a Frost and Sullivan market analysis reported as the most widely-used speech recognition technology in European healthcare.
SpeechMagic 6.1 is expected to boost speech recognition accuracy and its scalability has been raised to up to 15,000 users per cluster. The software architecture enables fully centralised administration and management, facilitating integration with medical IT systems such as electronic patients records (EMR) and hospital information systems (HIS).

To enhance the transcription workflow, SpeechMagic calculates the amount of correction a recognised text will require and intelligently routes the document to the most suitable transcriber. The new version is believed to further accelerate the spread of speech recognition-based medical reporting, because it reflects the needs of physicians and hospital administrators for higher efficiency, security and flexibility in medical document creation. It will be launched for integratin to the Philips partners end of 2006 and is expected to be first implemented in 2007.

01.07.2006

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