Philips provides speech-recognition to Oslo hospital

Philips has agreed a new deal to deploy SpeechMagic across the Ulleval University Hospital in Oslo, Norway’s largest clinical centre.

The hospital will roll out SpeechMagic to more than 1,000 physicians across all medical specialties.

Once completed in early 2009, Philips says the implementation is expected to be the world’s largest deployment of front-end speech recognition at one single hospital site.

The hospital expects to increase the quality of medical reports, speed up documentation workflows and reduce administrative costs, which should contribute to improved patient care.

“We see patient safety as the most important advantage of this technology”, said Jens Grøgaard, Ulleval University Hospital’s clinical manager.

“Every department will have full access to critical patient information, which helps to significantly improve the quality of care. Since the report is printed instantly, the entire team involved in delivering care to a patient can rely on accurate, written information,” he added.

The hospital-wide deal, which came through the local Philips Speech Recognition Systems partner Max Manus, follows a successful pilot in Ulleval’s radiology department, where report turnaround time was reduced by 96%.

“We are expecting to save tens of millions of Norwegian crowns each year thanks to more accurate, convenient and efficient information capturing. By allowing our physicians to directly dictate into the electronic medical record, the entire hospital will benefit from a streamlined flow of information,” said project manager Andreas Atteraas Grønbekk.

SpeechMagic has been implemented in more than 8,000 sites worldwide, sold by over 200 Philips partners.

“Norway is probably the world’s most advanced country regarding the adoption of speech recognition-based information capturing in healthcare. The scale of this latest deployment proves that speech recognition-based information capturing in electronic health records has become a reality and the verbal interaction between physicians and IT systems can help reduce adoption barriers,” said Björn Aune, sales director Nordics for Philips Speech Recognition Systems.

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