SAN DIEGO, Calif. -- At this year's Health Information and Management Systems Society Annual Conference and Exhibition, Dictaphone will show how its speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP) software can be used to convert dictated patient information into data that can be seamlessly shared with almost any standards-based electronic health record (EHR) system. The demonstration will be part of a series of interoperability showcases presented by Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), a global initiative that creates the framework for passing vital health information seamlessly -- from application to application, system to system, and setting to setting -- across multiple healthcare enterprises.
This ability to pass information real-time between various applications is made possible by adherence to IHE's Cross Enterprise Sharing of Medical Summaries (XDS-MS) profile, an emerging industry interchange standard. Keith W. Boone, a senior consulting engineer for Dictaphone, serves as co-chair of the IHE Patient Care Coordination Technical Committee, which produced the XDS-MS profile, as well as editor of the Health Level 7 (HL7) Care Record Summaries Implementation Guide.
In the demonstration, a "physician" will dictate a discharge report using Dictaphone's speech recognition software, which automatically converts voice to text. Dictaphone's proprietary NLP technology then works in the background to generate an HL7 Care Record Summary, which permits data to be exchanged with other EHR systems supplied by vendors participating in the showcase.
"With interoperability a watchword in the dialogue on creating electronic health records and regional health information organizations, or RHIOs, Dictaphone is pleased to be supporting the development of these key information exchange standards," said Don Fallati, executive vice president of marketing for Dictaphone. "We believe our speech recognition and NLP technologies will play a crucial role in providing clinical documentation tools that will actually be used and preferred by physicians, while meeting the needs of the new standards-based environment."
An estimated 50 percent or more of the patient chart is made up of dictated reports, the preferred physician documentation method. Rather than requiring physicians to change or anyone to manually enter discrete data elements into a software application (typical of most EMR systems), Dictaphone's NLP technology makes this dictated information rapidly available in a summarized data format. The technology analyzes and "reads" electronic text documents and extracts important medical facts, storing them in a database in structured data format along with a link to the section of the electronic report from which they were extracted. Testing has proved the high accuracy of NLP technology, which is based on computational linguistics.
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