Pontypridd & Rhondda NHS Trust provides a range of acute and community hospital services. It serves a population of approximately 250,000 and Radiology performs approximately 130,000 examinations each year across 3 hospital sites.

The Radiology Directorate has been using digital dictation since 1999 and it was a natural progression to move to speech recognition. The aim of introducing voice recognition was to increase productivity and reduce the turnaround time of reports. “We were looking for a solution that would improve patient care and be a means of delivering reports as quickly as possible,” says Paul Johnston, Project Lead.

The ability to use multiple input devices was another important factor. Besides dictating using a wired Philips speechmike, consultants can also use a combination of a wireless headset and a foot control, thereby leaving their hands free for navigating in the PACS system, “The application is user friendly and I am very happy to be able to use the system hands-free while looking at patient images on the PACS workstation,” reports Dr Stephen Davies Consultant Radiologist.

All the consultants have the choice of using either interactive or batch recognition modes reducing secretarial input and improving turnaround times. Clinical staff that need to refer to Radiology investigations can also use telephony for listen access, which means that reports can be listened to down the telephone.

After attending a site visit at the VU Medical Centre in Amsterdam where MediSpeech is currently being used and a competing in a complex tender process they decided on London based firm G2 Speech UK Ltd as a solution provider.

“We looked at a number of different solutions, but MediSpeech powered by SpeechMagic from Philips was our system of choice,” adds Paul Johnston. The current speech recognition results speak for themselves.

A project meeting was setup and a project plan was drafted. The implementation took place at the end of June 2007. The G2 Speech training team trained their trainer and now 12 consultants and 12 sonographers happily use Medispeech on a daily basis saving a great deal of time on report creation.

The system is fully integrated with their Radis II RIS using two-way HL7 links and full desktop integration with the Radis client. Further integration is provided with Carestream PACS streamlining the reporting workflow.