Speech recognition: a bridge for facilitating continuity of care
October 17, 2008
Finnish hospitals are increasingly realising there is a need to eliminate gaps in patient care in order to streamline clinical processes both in-house and with cooperating institutions.
Speech recognition can be used to attain true continuity of care, says Sauli Karvonen, a leading expert on patient flow analysis and efficient hospital planning. Karvonen is Managing Director of SKA-Research.
Scandinavia is generally considered a leader in the adoption of speech recognition technology. How is speech recognition being received in Finland?
In Scandinavia, Norway is certainly ahead when it comes to the adoption of speech recognition in the healthcare system. Finnish hospitals, too, are becoming more inclined to work with speech recognition. We are currently negotiating, for example, with several university hospitals that are planning to extend their use of speech recognition. Overall, though, Finland is still behind Norway.
Where do you see the key advantages of speech recognition in the context of the Finnish healthcare system?
I think that the most important message that we have to bring forward is that speech recognition is an excellent tool for improving the quality and continuity of care in the hospital setting and beyond. So far, we have talked too much about productivity and costeffectiveness and far too little about quality. Doctors, in particular, do not usually want to talk about IT systems and implementations. They are interested in providing optimum care for their patients. And this is exactly what speech recognition can deliver: it optimises patient care by streamlining the care process, by reducing document turnaround times, by making information more accurate and more reliable. I like the concept of a “lean” hospital in this context. Speech recognition should be a natural part of lean hospital planning.
How exactly can speech recognition contribute to a "lean" hospital?
Today, hospitals tend to be organised functionally. There are many specialised departments operating side by side. When it comes to patient information, each department is like a silo. Traditional dictation contributes to this silo infrastructure. Indeed, it actually reinforces the situation by creating a vast amount of department-specific document turnaround cycles. In the end, though, all information has to be brought together, so it would be far more efficient to eliminate unnecessary steps right away. And this is where speech recognition comes in.
By encompassing dictation, revision and writing in one workflow?
Exactly. With speech recognition, fewer reworking and revisions are needed. The documents become more precise, and they are available more quickly. This makes it easier to coordinate the activities of different departments. There is less uncertainty, less information gathering. In the end, all this results first and foremost in a higher quality of patient care. Of course, a hospital will also benefit economically from lean clinical processes. But the most important point and the one that convinces doctors and nurses is that the quality of patient care will be raised to a higher level. Speech recognition bridges the gaps in the dictation process, and by doing so it bridges the gaps in functionally organised hospitals.
You mentioned that you are currently talking with several hospitals in Finland about speech recognition implementations. What would be your advice to any hospital planning to implement speech recognition?
First of all, they have to know their dictation processes very well. They have to identify the challenges in the current system, and they have to know about hospital-specific gaps in the care process. Only if the status quo is well known will it be possible for a consultant to help design a speech recognition implementation that really solves the quality problems of the hospital. So, focus on processes and quality of care first, and about implementation second.
How could the general awareness of process-based quality improvement through speech recognition be raised?
We regularly present our concept of a lean hospital to representatives of Finnish hospitals. We see time and again that it is the quality of care and closing the gaps in the care process which really convince people. It might actually be a good idea to include and extend education about these issues within the framework of the medical school curriculum, in particular the education of nurses. But in this context, we are certainly not talking exclusively about speech recognition. There are many more tools for improving processes in order to create a truly lean hospital. Speech recognition is one of them. It is an important one, but it is not the only one.
Mr. Karvonen, thank you for your time and answers.
SpeechMagic Executive Advanced (SMEA) is a report management solution for Finnish hospitals that caters to a variety of medical documentation use cases from dictation and transcription to speech recognition. The system seamlessly integrates with any healthcare infrastructure and features the new Finnish MultiMed ConText for hospital-wide speech recognition.
