Speech Recognition System Improves Radiology Efficiency and Reporting Workflow

A new speech recognition system is designed to streamline radiology interpretation tasks and minimize the time and effort required to complete daily reporting activities.

Agfa HealthCare (Mortsel, Belgium), a leading provider of diagnostic imaging and healthcare information technology (IT) solutions, announced the release of TalkStation 4.0, its integrated speech recognition workflow system for radiology reporting. The new software platform includes features that improve physician efficiency, enhance speech recognition, and provide tighter integration with the company's Impax radiology picture archiving and communication systems (PACS).

"The solution has a number of new features that improve the way physicians interact with the application," said Dr. Kevin Junck, associate professor of radiology and chief of radiology informatics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB; USA) Health System. "It has become embedded in clinician workflow and even radiologists that were advocates of traditional transcription want to use it for everything."

New features include enhanced workflow for resident training, including customized activity worklists, attending physician rejection of reports, and "read-out” workflow for joint report approval by resident and attending physician; Web-based sign-off of reports supports resident- or transcription-based workflows; "My Activities" toolbar, which makes it easy for radiologists to find preliminary and corrected reports, and in an academic environment, resident reports that need approval; and automatic color coding of report text based on input device draws the radiologist's eyes to areas of the report that are at greater risk for inaccuracy.

User interface with virtually unlimited flexibility enables physicians to move, add, or remove toolbars and toolbar buttons and choose from different skins to meet the lighting needs of multiple viewing room situations.

In addition, TalkStation 4.0 enables more efficient report creation due to a reduction in both voice recognition errors and report editing time. "The most important thing in radiology reporting is accuracy," said Dr. Junck. "Our move to the latest version of Agfa HealthCare's TalkStation has provided a tremendous increase in speech recognition accuracy."

TalkStation 4.0 interfaces with Impax, allowing it to function as an integrated extension of the PACS, instead of operating as an independent application. For example, TalkStation is configured to automatically populate exam accession numbers from the PACS, eliminating a step that previously required physicians to initiate synchronization.

"Agfa HealthCare is committed to maximizing physician efficiency by helping radiology departments improve reporting quality," said Lenny Reznik, director, Enterprise Imaging and Information, Agfa HealthCare. "With TalkStation 4.0, Agfa HealthCare advances radiology reporting with state-of-the-art technology, toolsets, and workflows."

Agfa HealthCare is a provider of IT-enabled clinical workflow and diagnostic image management solutions, and systems for capturing and processing images in hospitals and healthcare facilities.

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