Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust

Wireless enabled digital dictation and speech recognition benefits Imperial College

Background
Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust was formed on October 1 2007, when Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust and St Mary’s NHS Trust merged and integrated with Imperial College London, forming the UK’s first academic health science centre (AHSC).

The Trust is also one of only five generic biomedical research centres (BRCs) in the UK. The Trust was awarded this status by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) in recognition of their excellence in translational and clinical research. The Clinical Sciences Centre of the Medical Research Council (MRC) is also based at Hammersmith Hospital, providing a strong foundation for clinical and scientific research.

Business Drivers
The NHS Trust had looked at a number of possible solutions, but wanted to deploy a solution that was capable of integrating with the College’s Misys CoPath Pathology system and which had a wireless dictation capability for the cut up areas.

Dr Nicolas Francis, Consultant Pathologist at Imperial College says: “SRC was the group that came up with an integrated solution, utilising different aspects to the problems that we were trying to solve and had a good project team that kept us on track and informed us of developments as we were going through the process.”

In addition to having the right solution there were two principal reasons for adopting digital dictation and speech recognition as Dr Francis explains: “The first was to improve turnaround times and efficiencies within the department. We felt the normal process of hand written forms going to secretaries for transcription, back to doctors for checking before sign out with the possible increase delay of necessary corrections could be avoided by the direct voice recognition side of the consultants and training medical staff doing the reporting. The other reason was financial and the staffing resources we had at the time.”

SRC solution
At the time of rolling out the solution, SRC were the only digital dictation provider capable of deploying a wireless solution, which is a fundamental requirement in Pathology cut up areas. Dr Francis adds: “We adopted digital dictation with a hands-free aspect to it with footpedal operation. Both the digital dictation and speech recognition could integrate with our Pathology system without any additional cost or having to write specific interfaces.”

Speech recognition
As part of the solution SRC deployed a speech recognition solution to empower consultants and clinicians to control the document creation and review process directly from their PC. Dr Francis adds; “Those that are using it best have probably got a 95-98% accuracy rate in everything they dictate. Developing the training and the voice recognition for the consultants who were going to primarily use it wasn’t difficult. There was a cultural change to undergo and then the training intensity that both you have to receive and give to your voice profile to make sure it is as efficient as possible.”

Key services
Dr Francis explains; “The SRC resources they provided were project management and expertise in training and particular expertise with the integration with our CoPath system; because that was essentially tailor-made to enable us to automate as many steps in the process as possible.”

Results
The benefits of the SRC solution to Imperial College have been directly related to the integration as much as the digital dictation and speech recognition as Dr. Francis explains; “The benefit of the integration to date are that you have very close control over individual cases. You can do everything from editing the Macroscopic description through to the whole Macroscopic report and sign out. A case that may have taken me 15 minutes to look at, write a report and send it to the secretaries, I’d then have to go and find that case later on and check it and sign out. Whereas now I can do the entire case in 15 or 20 minutes in one go,” adds Dr Francis.

As well as controlling the dictation and document creation process from within the CoPath system the solutions also has other benefits: “Cost benefits has been that we’ve not been required to replace a vacant secretarial post which has effectively paid for the digital dictation solution. We’ve had some improved turnaround times as a benefit to the reputation of the department and patient care.”