>> The company Nuance Healthcare has now managed to equip around 70 percent of all American hospitals with speech recognition solutions. What is meant here is not just the “Medical Practice Edition” (cost: 1,599 euros), which enables doctors in private practice, usually working alone or in a small team with MTA, to record medical information directly in the doctor's information system by voice, but a family of solutions , which can cover pretty much any form of contemporary medical documentation - from digital dictation, front-end and back-end speech recognition, to workflow and transcription functionality and further to the cloud-based approach. Further solution packages such as the “Development Platform”, the “Workflow Edition” and/or the “SpeechAnywhere Services” are used here, a new set of cloud and network-based web services for the secure and quick implementation of speech recognition functions in existing clinical or mobile applications .
However, with this more scalable, all-inclusive approach, the company, which now has customers and partners in more than 30 countries, charges completely different amounts. But it seems to be worth it for the users, because more than 500,000 clinically active doctors in more than 10,000 institutions now work with the software packages that have won various awards and that help support the clinical workflow. Since this claim has not yet been proven in reality, Nuance had a study carried out between January and April in England and in March of this year in Germany.
197 participating employees from two university hospitals, including 40 % doctors, 20 % nursing staff, 27 % therapy staff and 13 % in other functions, contributed to collecting almost 40,000 data points in England during the study period, which were then analyzed in sub-segments and in their entirety .
A first result of this study is the finding that the average time that the respondents had to spend on clinical documentation alone was 10.8 hours per week, although doctors still had to invest a little more time than other functionaries in the clinics (11.5 hours). However, what is important is not the total time itself, but how it is divided; on the one hand in narrative, on the other hand in structured content. While the doctors observed in the study spent 68.6 % (7.4 hours per week) of their time recording narrative (i.e. mostly unstructured content that was to be transferred from oral to written form), the nursing staff only did so 6.8 hours. This was an important note for Nuance, because - according to the initial thesis of the study - it is precisely the entry of this narrative content that can be influenced by technical solutions.
Another study finding is how much time clinical officers have to spend looking for information... <<