The technology has helped the radiology and nuclear medicine departments to boost their efficiency, thus moving from a two-week reporting backlog to same-day reporting.
The radiology and nuclear medicine departments of the Children’s Hospital at Westmead (CHW) produce 55,000 reports each year. Before implementing SpeechMagic, they had been suffering from a distinct backlog of information that could delay the availability of medical information up to two weeks.
CHW is using background speech recognition: the clinicians record their dictations on a PC and the recorded audio file is transferred from there to the SpeechMagic engine. The automatically generated text is then sent to transcriptionists, who review it and correct recognition errors if needed.
KC Fan, chief radiographer at CHW, said: Now all reports are finalized at the end of the same day on which they were created. Our two-week backlog vanished and the accuracy of our reports has increased, as the secretaries can now spend more time on each report and improve the quality of their work. This provides obvious benefits for the children in our care.
