Speech recognition used in pathology cut-up at Derriford Hospital

PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND: The Histopathology Department at Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust has successfully extended its TalkingPoint pathology deployment from microscopy to include cut-up.

TalkingPoint allows a Biomedical Scientist (BMS) to efficiently generate a cut-up report using speech recognition (SR) unassisted by a scribe. TalkingPoint also automates LIMS entry, saving a further hour per day.

The TalkingPoint Team developed a workflow solution to enable paper-free cut-up. Whereas before, the BMS and scribe conferred to confirm the correct patient specimen and request form are matched up, with TalkingPoint, the BMS simply scans the specimen barcode causing the request form to be automatically displayed on the PC screen, preventing collation errors. Although Derriford Histopathology cut-up is not yet completely paperless, the simple workflow enables a BMS to singlehandedly double-check that the specimen container and associated request form correlate.

For following microscopy reporting, TalkingPoint automates non-complex standard reports (for example, normal duodenal biopsies) by filling in the text, formatting the report and generating the SNOMED codes, while non-standard complex reports can be efficiently dictated as a combination of shortcuts, pro-formas and free text.

TalkingPoint is the only true end-to-end NHS pathology SR workflow solution serving cut up, microscopy and autopsy. Its use in over 20 UK Trusts has resulted in unique and outstanding features, assuring improved efficiency, minimised turn-around times and significant cost savings.