SRC is Awarded Digital Dictation and Speech Recognition Framework Agreement by NHS Yorkshire and Humber Collaborative Procurement Consortium

[Nik's comment: it has to be said, appointing 5 suppliers as the outcome of a tendering process seems rather like skipping the tendering process! We await annoucements from the other 3!]

SRC appointed as a supplier under a four year framework agreement with the NHS Yorkshire and Humber Collaborative Procurement Hub (YHCPC). This agreement covers the deployment of SRC's digital dictation, voice recognition and outsourced transcription solutions to over 200 Acute, Mental and Primary Care Trusts.

Yorkshire and Humber NHS Procurement Hub Selects BigHand Voice Platform

BigHand has announced that following a tender and evaluation process, the NHS Yorkshire and Humber Commercial Procurement Collaborative has selected BigHand along with 5 other providers for the provision of digital dictation workflow software and speech recognition technology.

MacSpeech, Inc. Launches MacSpeech Dictate Medical

MacSpeech, Inc. today announced the release and immediate availability of MacSpeech Dictate Medical, the medical professional's speech recognition solution for the Macintosh.

Designed specifically for the medical and dental professional and their support staff, MacSpeech Dictate Medical empowers dictating text directly into applications and practice management systems, and issuing numerous commands by voice, on the Macintosh. MacSpeech Dictate Medical includes a digitally enhanced, USB headset microphone.

Age-related difficulty recognizing words characterised by brain differences

Older adults may have difficulty understanding speech because of age-related changes in brain tissue, according to new research in the May 13 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The study shows that older adults with the most difficulty understanding spoken words had less brain tissue in a region important for speech recognition. The findings may help explain why hearing aids do not benefit all people with age-related hearing difficulties.

Although some hearing loss can be a normal part of aging, many older adults complain about difficulty understanding speech, especially in challenging listening conditions like crowded restaurants. Research has suggested that this decline in speech recognition is independent of hearing loss.

Harris and her colleagues found that structural differences in the brain's auditory cortex predicted performance on the task, even when they controlled for hearing loss. The older adults who had the most difficulty recognizing words also had the least brain volume in a region of auditory cortex called Heschl's gyrus/superior temporal gyrus. However, the relationship between the ability to identify words and the volume of auditory cortex was also present in younger adults.

M*Modal's Advanced Speech Recognition Technology is Incorporated into Scribe's Web-based Document Solutions

M*Modal today announced Scribe Healthcare Technology has incorporated the company's Speech Understanding technology into its web-based medical dictation, transcription and archival solutions.

Scribe's technology offerings simplify the business of medicine by providing web-based solutions for clinical information production, workflow management and analysis to healthcare providers and medical transcription service organizations that service them.

East Kent cuts turn around times with SRC

East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust has been able to reduce cancer diagnosis times by deploying digital dictation with speech recognition from SRC.

The new technology is allowing pathologists to dictate results in real-time. As a result, histology reporting turnaround times have been cut from a week to often the same day.

Paul Williams, head of BMS cellular pathology at East Kent said: “It has been invaluable in helping us to improve reporting turnaround times and eradicate typing backlogs in spite of increasing workloads. Another, unexpected benefit has been freeing up secretarial staff to train in laboratory duties.”

Speech recognition slashes turnaround times for HCA's radiology reports

HCA International, a central London healthcare facility has rolled-out speech recognition-based radiology reporting on 12 sites. The technology has reduced average report creation times to 2:40 minutes from 24 hours previously. Adoption levels among radiologists surpassed the initial goal of 60% by the end of the project: with two-thirds of the roll-out complete, more than 96% of the dictations are already processed through speech recognition. [click heading for more]

Speech recognition solution to generate documents at Newham University Hospital

SRC, a provider of digital dictation and speech recognition to NHS Trusts, has been selected to deploy speech recognition to the Radiology department at Newham University Hospital NHS Trust (NUHT). The solution enables Radiologists, Sonographers and Reporting Radiographers to create documents and reports directly from voice commands and spoken words, rather than using the current time-consuming method of self-typing. [click heading for more]

Did You Say Know or No?

Advances in speech recognition technology are helping providers automate the dictation process.

At its inception, speech recognition technology was offered up as yet another way to reduce healthcare costs by eliminating the need for medical transcriptionists through automation of the dictation process. The software soon revealed significant limitations, however, including the inability to recognize some accents and nuances in conversations—the difference between know and no, for example. Those issues have led some physicians to conclude that speech recognition technology may be more work than it's worth. But some new advances could have detractors changing their tune. 

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M*Modal Announces Real-Time Speech Understanding Application for Healthcare Professionals Available on Apple App Store

While clinical dictation was possible before via telephone or PDA devices, the resulting report was not available for hours. AnyModal CDS Mobile delivers documents in real time to the physician's iPhone, making it the first device to capture, understand and transcribe dictation in real-time. Physicians can now immediately review and sign off on a clinical document.

The company's core product, AnyModal(TM) CDS (Conversational Documentation Services), based on a unique combination of proprietary speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies, turns clinical dictation directly into structured and encoded clinical documents.

The highly configurable, service-oriented architecture (SOA), paired with the platform independent set of thin client user interface components, enables M*Modal partners to incorporate AnyModal CDS into their workflow solutions.

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