Dear Healthcare IT Insider,
Speech recognition technology has been controversial since the day the first commercial system for radiology report dictation was introduced. It's frequently a subject of lively discussion in the AuntMinnie.com Forums, and hundreds of our readers have followed the most recent debate over system-generated dictation errors in our General Radiology Forum.
Ironically, this was the very subject we were planning for this month's Insider Exclusive. Quality control programs at hospital radiology departments and independent practices using speech recognition systems often conduct a periodic analysis of overlooked dictation errors in reports. The findings, whether impressive or worrisome, rarely are made public.
For this reason, we found of great interest a detailed analysis of overlooked errors in radiology reports from the University of Michigan Health System. Dr. Leslie Quint and colleagues evaluated a portion of the CT reports generated by her department for the frequency and spectrum of overlooked errors. How do you compare? Click here to find out.
Vendors work hard to continue to improve the accuracy of their systems, but non-native language dialects remain a technological challenge. Contributing writer Rick Dana Barlow had a candid conversation with five major vendors to find out what they are doing to make understanding dialects easier.
The use of structured reports is another controversial subject. Radiologists who debate the value of structured reports will be interested in staff writer Kate Madden Yee's coverage of a study presented at the 2008 RSNA meeting -- results showed that the use of structured report formats for brain MRI scans conveyed more information about tumor status than unstructured reports. If you missed this presentation, you'll want to read about it by clicking here.
What else did you miss? If you were celebrating the holidays and welcoming in the new year, we encourage you to scrutinize the list of articles below and visit your Healthcare IT Digital Community. There's been a lot of interesting healthcare IT news since our early December newsletter.
