Reengineering radiology transcription process through Voice Recognition

Quality and timeliness of radiology reports are critical in the patient care delivery process. Voice Recognition (VR) has been viewed as a tool that could revolutionize the traditional radiology report transcription process and simultaneously improve the report generation quality. This paper proposes several potential metrics that could be used to monitor the impact of VR on the operations of a radiology department. Self-editing of reports holds the key to the reduction in report turnaround time, as well as the reduction in transcriptionist needs. Through process mapping of the current system and the future system after VR implementation, it was identified that the self-editing of reports may co-exist with the transcriptionist-based editing of reports due to radiologists¿ preferences. A simulation study was conducted to gauge the level of impact of self-editing. The results showed that report turnaround time could reduce to 2 hours (from about 21 hours) with comprehensive (100%) self-editing.