New technology is transforming the ways doctors work. Dr Justin Whatling, vice chair of strategy & policy at BCS Health and BT Health’s chief clinical offi cer, explains the key trends and outlines the next steps trusts can take.
now sophisticated technological developments are taking this practice to a whole new level. Advances in natural language processing in transcription systems mean that voice recognition is starting to be used, increasing effi ciency savings for the NHS.
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Dr Justin Whatling, vice chair of Strategy & Policy at BCS Health and a former hospital physician working in neurology, spoke to NHE about the latest progress in this fi eld.
Intelligent technology
Some of these newer technologies include learning systems, so the programme can use examples of
ictation and transcription have long been used in the health service, but
secretaries correcting certain errors to increase its own accuracy levels.
Dr Whatling explained: “The more data they have, the easier it is to do, and they learn quickly so the secretary needs to correct less and less over time.”
He said that the accuracy of these kinds of systems increases with use, due to these learning capabilities and pre-embedded terminology to recognise certain medical terms.
“They’re generally very accurate, and the learning makes them even more so. It’s amazingly clever, it deals with all your ‘ums’ and ‘urrs’,” Dr Whatling added. Another intelligent development is the option to create structured outputs, formatting text into the template of a letter or medical
40 national health executive Jan/Feb 12
report. This maps specifi c text into the slots, such as patient name and blood pressure.
Dr Whatling suggested this would be very helpful and “quite powerful” in discharge summaries or referrals as it reduces the amount of work for secretaries.
“You can also use some of these solutions to control your interface. This is suitable for professionals and staff such as radiologists who generally report sitting at a station, being very dynamic, so you can imagine how they can quickly get used to using structured commands. Most applications are built on Windows- like environments, so the software programmes have been able to couple in operating systems commands.”
Adapting to technology
Commenting on the modifi cation needed to transform natural speech into coherent text, Dr Whatling said: “It does require a lot of grammatical correction and re-constructing sentences to compensate for how people talk versus how things should be written. There must be quite a lot of intelligence and understanding of language and how to construct it.”
The potential to increase system integration means transcriptions can be uploaded into an electronic document management system or patient record system, thus increasing effi ciency.
“Moving to electronic discharge summaries rather than paper ones means you don’t have all the
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