Dear RIS Insider,
If your practice hasn't adopted speech recognition (SR) technology and you're based in a competitive environment, chances are better than even that you will. The speed in report turnaround time, compared with dictation and manual transcription, provides a market advantage to groups that have implemented these applications. As exam volumes continue to rise, the disparity between SR and manual transcription will become even more pronounced.
However, the history of SR deployment has been fraught with struggle and disappointment for radiologist users, particularly during the early phases of its rollout. Productivity decreases for radiologists during the training stage of the SR application are commonplace, as is their frustration with being forced to act, in effect, as a medical transcriptionist.
Recognizing this, a group of radiologists and software developers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) introduced an integrated document-authoring system to ease the transition to SR for the hospital's radiology department. They also implemented a change-management strategy that enabled them to immediately leverage the strengths of SR without disrupting the productivity or workflow of UPMC radiologists.
To learn more about how a team at UPMC smoothly and successfully implemented SR in its radiology department, click here. As a RIS Insider subscriber, you have access to this story before it's published for the rest of our AuntMinnie.com members.
Also, be sure to check back in with us in early February. We'll be at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in San Diego providing coverage on breaking healthcare informatics news.
Finally, if you have a comment or story to share about any aspects of RIS or healthcare IT, please get in touch with me at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you.
