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Transcribing dictated notes from clinicians is a hugely expensive and
time-consuming process. One possible cure could be a new solution under
validation that offers speech recognition and secure wireless communication
for electronic-patient-record systems.
Patients' notes in hospitals and general-practice surgeries generally rely
to a large extent on clinicians dictating their notes - which are then
transcribed by a secretary into free-text electronic form. Simply converting
speech into electronic format and updating patients' medical records can
employ up to 15 per cent of hospital's personnel alone, and all for a result
that is less than perfect. While convenient for the doctors themselves, it
is less than ideal as an electronic record, being mostly non-searchable and
without any kind of formal information structure.
The IST project DICTATe (finishing June 2005) aims to both increase the
efficacy of such patient records, and at the same time reduce the costs
incurred in preparing them. "We want to close the gap that exists between
what clinicians want, and the needs of health information applications,"
says project coordinator Milena Hrbackova of IDS Scheer in Brno (Czech
Republic). "Doctors like the flexibility of free-text dictation, but
information systems require more categorisation."
The key components of the DICTATe system include:
Modified PDA that supports speech dictation, text input and wireless
communication.
Wireless communication infrastructure to facilitate secure, real-time
exchange of data with the handheld PDA.
Server application that performs voice-to-text conversion, medical-language
processing and communication with both the clinician's PDA and the
hospital's electronic records system. This server application is also
applying some of the latest advances in structured document representation,
automated speech recognition and natural language processing to convert the
doctor's input into a structured format.
Being tested across Europe
DICTATe is now approaching the validation phase, which will see the complete
system being tested in April/May 2005 at four pilot sites across Europe: a
hospital in Modena, Italy (Azienda Unita Sanitaria di Modena), an
outpatients health clinic in Thessaloniki, Greece (EURODIAGNOSI), another
independent hospital in Greece, and at a DICTATe international workshop
hosted in Brussels.
The project partners believe that DICTATe will pave the way for much wider
deployment of speech-processing technologies into electronic-patient-record
systems. Speech recognition is now poised to overcome the previous obstacles
of natural language and categorisation, and become a cost-effective means of
clinical reporting and integration into the medical record.
The prototype system planned for the end of the project will function in
English and to a limited extent in Italian. However, the project partners
are expecting widespread interest in the results, which are also being
disseminated at the Medetel conference in Luxembourg in April 2005. And,
says Hrbackova, "we know that there are several hospitals that are waiting
to see the results."
Contact:
Milena Hrbackova
IDS Scheer
Sídlo spole?nosti:
Víde?ská 55
63900 Brno
Czech Republic
Tel: +420-5-4352 4630
Fax: +420-5-4352 4601
Email: m.hrbackova@ids-scheer.cz
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