Toolo Hospital of Helsinki University Central Hospital is the largest trauma hospital in Scandinavia. It provides trauma care, orthopedics, plastic surgery, and neurosurgery for 1.5 million people living in southern Finland. To provide faster turnaround of radiology reports, the imaging department began to use a speech recognition system in 2005. The technology was adopted rapidly with a high acceptance level by the radiologists.
Researchers had documented that adopting this technology expedited care of patients in the hospital and improved productivity for the department, and they anecdotally felt its use had created more structured and focused dictations. But they had never measured how the technology affected the length of dictations.
Tomi Kauppinen, PhD, development director of the HUS Medical Imaging Center in Helsinki, will report the findings of an analysis of report length two and six years following radiologists' implementation of speech recognition technology. They discovered that reports decreased in length by up to 45% without compromising content and quality.
"This surprising finding is previously undocumented and calls for further research," Kauppinen said. Learn more by attending this poster presentation.
