Radiologists Get Down to Smooth Talkin’ With Brit Speak
This week, radiology solutions provider Brit Systems announced the release of Brit Speak, a stand-alone dictation, transcription, report distribution, and optional voice recognition solution for radiological workers and doctors.
Brit Speak will be available with both Brit’s Roentgen Radiology Information System and Roentgen Works remote reading solution.
The announcement is part of a continuing trend of voice technology integration into radiological work. Deployment in the field has generally been rapid because of an inherent symbiotic relationship between the work radiologists do and already existing technologies. Datamonitor assistant analyst Aphrodite Brinsmead points this out in her report, “Automating and Enhancing Processes through Voice in Desktop and Back Office Environments.”
She writes, “Radiologists' jobs involve looking at images on monitors and dictating the information into report format….Using speech to dictate presents an easy option for them to create documents while they use their hands to operate hospital equipment.”
Brinsmead goes on to argue the repetitious nature of radiological vocabulary also lends itself particularly well to word lists. This, coupled with rising healthcare costs and the resulting need to make cuts while simultaneously increasing efficiency and reducing errors, has led to speedy deployments.
Brit Speak, in lock step with these trends, is built around an existing engine. The system integrates the Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech engine from Nuance Communications and Dragon’s companion Radiologist Vocabulary, which Brit sees as a major advantage.
“We've integrated the Dragon speech engine into our newly developed voice recognition module so the solution can remain on the leading edge of voice technology improvements,” says Shelly Fisher, the company’s president.
Fisher also sees integration itself as key selling point of the product. By integrating rather than embedding the Dragon speech engine, Brit company officials contend that they will be able to exploit new features and advances that might appear in successive versions of the engine and its vocabularies.
“The technology improves by leaps and bounds with each new release, and so we are able to get those improvements to our customers rapidly versus using other toolkits,” Fisher touts.
The full Brit Speak system includes a voice dictation module and a voice recognition module. The dictation module manages workflow around industry standard format sound files and makes them accessible by a transcriptionist over the Internet. The recognition module packages in the Dragon engine and vocabulary. Both modules can be purchased separately.