Speech recognition 40% faster than legacy methods in hospital emergency departments

Published: 15-Feb-2018

Study of the impact of speech recognition within the emergency department of South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust reveals significant time savings

  • Nuance Communications report reveals 86% of clinicians involved in the deployment agreed that speech recognition enabled more-complete patient notes
  • Speech recognition is now clinicians’ preferred means of capturing clinical documentation into the EPR across emergency departments (EDs)
  • All clinicians reported that the speech recognition deployment in ED had a positive impact
  • Most (67%) of clinicians believed patients had no concerns with their use of speech recognition

The use of speech recognition technology within hospital emergency departments can speed up clinical documentation turnaround by up to 40%, according to new research.

Nuance Communications has this week announced the results of a study which analysed the impact of the deployment of speech recognition within the emergency department (ED) at South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

Speech recognition has transformed our ED, releasing our doctors and nurses from the shackles of clinical documentation and enabling them to spend more time treating patients

The results are derived from an indepth structured questionnaire capturing the perceptions of participating clinicians.

They report that speech recognition is 40% faster than handwriting or typing clinical documentation.

Extrapolating the reported documentation time savings per patient over a year is the equivalent of gaining almost two full-time clinical staff in the ED.

A previous study commissioned by Nuance identified that 50% or more of a doctor´s time is spent on clinical documentation processes, and that around 52 minutes a day can be spent searching for information not captured or not clear in the record.

Following implementation of the ED’s electronic patient record (EPR) there was a clear need to improve the ease and speed of creation as well as the quality of the patient record for ED clinicians.

To tackle this South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust deployed Nuance Dragon Medical speech recognition integrated into the EPR to help clinicians overcome the growing administration burden.

The average time saving using speech recognition versus typing was almost three minutes per patient.

The quality of the patient record was also boosted. 86% of clinicians involved in the deployment agreed that speech recognition enabled more-complete patient notes. And nine out of 10 felt that using speech recognition compared to handwriting and typing saved time, improved the quality of the notes, and increased the speed of communication with others.

Other findings from the report include:

  • Speech recognition is now the clinicians’ preferred means of capturing clinical documentation into the EPR across the ED
  • All clinicians reported that the speech recognition deployment in ED had a positive impact
  • Most (67%) of clinicians believed patients had no concerns with their use of speech recognition

Commenting on the findings, Dr Andrew Adair, ED consultant and chief clinical information officer at South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Speech recognition has transformed our ED, releasing our doctors and nurses from the shackles of clinical documentation and enabling them to spend more time treating patients.”

To read the full report on the study, click here.

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