Speech recognition proves a hit with pathologists in NHS Grampian and North Tees & Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust

Background

NHS Grampian’s Aberdeen Royal Infirmary (ARI) is the largest hospital in northern Scotland. The Pathology Department at the hospital employs 19 consultants and handles approximately 1,700 tissue blocks each week, around 600 of which require biopsies.

North Tees & Hartlepool’s University Hospital of North Tees is a teaching infirmary in Stockton-on-Tees with over 560 beds. The Pathology Department employs multiple consultants across seven specialist areas.

Each Pathology Department has a pool of secretaries who manually type reports for the consultants. Backlogs built up when secretaries had to deal with a surge in the workload due to out-of-ours working or irregular shift patterns. This led to inevitable delays for patients. A solution was needed to speed up the process of turning a pathology report around in order to avoid bottlenecks during peak working hours.

Speech recognition

Both Pathology Departments already used digital dictation systems supplied by Voice Technologies. We were invited to explain the advantages that a speech recognition system could bring to their laboratory systems. We demonstrated how speech recognition system, Dragon Medical from Nuance, would enable the Pathologists to dictate their biopsy reports directly into the laboratory system instead of forwarding their dictations to the secretarial team for transcription.

Using the system, many of the Pathologists in both hospitals moved quickly from simple biopsy reports to larger and more complex reports. This was partly due to increasing user familiarity, and partly to the improvement of the speech recognition engine as it learned from each individual user.

After a short period of time, there was a significantly positive decrease in the reporting turnaround time at both locations. Both hospitals have since added more speech recognition users.