Dictaphone upgrades clinical documentation workflow platform with speech recognition. Source: Dictaphone

Dictaphone Healthcare Solutions, a division of Nuance Communications, has released a new version of its Enterprise Express Speech System, a speech-assisted transcription solution, designed to reduce transcription costs and speed report turnaround time in creating and distributing medical reports.

“The Enterprise Express Speech System was designed to help healthcare organizations improve the clinical documentation process, while lowering costs and enhancing operational efficiency,” Peter Durlach, senior vice president, marketing and product strategy, Dictaphone Healthcare Solutions, Nuance, told Health Imaging News.

Transcriptionists benefit from reviewing and editing highly accurate, formatted draft documents instead of transcribing dictated reports from scratch, Durlach said. With the Dragon Speech Technology, radiologists are provided with significantly increased accuracy of free-form telephony dictation, with proprietary medical language models and customized formatting technology to deliver a more accurate draft. This decreases the time it takes to create a final report, he added.

TransTech Medical Solutions provides transcription services for three Sunrise Health facilities in Las Vegas, using the Enterprise Express.  “We started using the Enterprise Express Speech System in late October of 2007 and have already seen a 500 percent increase in speech-recognized drafted reports. While just 20 members of our team of 300 transcriptionists are using the system now, we plan to expand its use significantly. In only 60 days we’ve seen dramatic productivity climbs,” said Tracy L. Boesch, president and chief operating officer, TransTech.

The system also incorporates Dictaphone’s “Smart ReWrite” technology, which learns new medical terminology, the structure and style of each physician’s documents and automatically corrects grammar mistakes, handles rephrasing, and customizes formatting, according to John Vaughn, product manager, Enterprise Express Speech System, Dictaphone. 

Vaughn said the Enterprise Express is an upgrade for customers already using the Enterprise Express clinical documentation workflow platform. “People using our platform can upgrade, or turbo charge, their existing system with speech recognition.”

“We are really focused on offering flexibility to our customers,” Durlach said.  “The Express platform can be deployed as a hosted (ASP) solution or an onsite solution, supporting both background and real-time speech,” which Durlach said is not usually found in an integrated platform.

“It really depends on what the customer wants,” he said. “The real focus is the productivity that an organization can garner from deploying the system.” Durlach said customers can average anywhere from low 30s up to 50, even 70 percent of their transcription costs. “It really depends on what you are trying to do—cut costs or improve productivity,” he said.

“Getting the accuracy of the report is extremely important but at the end of the day, it is really about productivity and producing reports in a timely fashion,” Vaughn said. “We have focused on making a transcription system that can bring our customers into speech recognition with a seamless transition.”