Improvement of report workflow and productivity using speech recognition--a follow-up study

Abstract

Speech recognition (SR), available since the 1980s, has only recently become sufficiently reliable to allow utilization in medical environment. This study measured the effect of SR for the radiological dictation process and estimated differences in report turnaround times (RTTs). During the transition from cassette-based reporting to SR, the workflow of 14 radiologists was periodically followed up for 2 years in a university hospital. The sample size was more than 20,000 examinations, and the radiologists were the same throughout the study. A RTT was defined as the time from imaging at the modality to the time when the report was available for the clinician. SR cut down RTTs by 81% and the standard deviation by 83%. The proportion of reports available within 1 h escalated from 26% to 58%. The proportion of reports created by SR increased during a follow-up time of this study from 0% up to 88%. SR decreases turnaround times and may thus speed up the whole patient care process by facilitating online reporting. SR was easily adopted and well accepted by radiologists. Our findings encourage the utilization of SR, which improves the productivity and accelerates the workflow with excellent end-user satisfaction.

Fig 1.

The radiological workflow.

Fig 2.

Proportion of reports created by SR.

Fig 3.

Modality distribution for each radiologist, where 1 = X-ray, 2 = angiography, 3 = CT, 4 = US, 5 = MR, and 6 = other.

Fig 4.

Distribution of RTTs.