More on European Speech Recognition Projects

Industry expert Nick van Terheyden, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Philips Speech Recognition Systems, wanted to comment on my previous thread about European speech recognition projects with a few additional figures. So it is with pleasure that I am posting van Terheyden’s thread today for another tour of Europe.

Speech recognition has definitely reached “tipping point” in the Old Continent with a rather impressive number of projects underway:

• The Dutch are driving forward with an adoption rate estimated at 80% in several specialties across the Netherlands.
• The Spanish are surging ahead with 50% of Spain’s radiologists using front-end speech recognition in the Valencia region.
• The Norwegians are notably ahead with 100% of Norway’s Healthcare regions implementing speech recognition.
• The Danes are delivering value at the Vejle County Hospital, where speech recognition is fully integrated with their electronic health record system for 1,400 users; an overall productivity rise of 5 to 7 percent that represents savings of several million Danish Kroner (1m DKK = 184,000 USD).
• The French are forging forward with all 39 Public hospitals in Paris (15,000 physicians and transcriptionists in total) to be equipped with speech recognition by 2010.
• And the Italians in all this? With no less than 22 hospitals in the idyllic Friuli-Venezia Giulia region having recently adopted front-end speech recognition, legions of physicians are just about to cross the RubiCon-Text. Alea jacta est.

Note: a ConText is a collection of acoustic data and vocabulary that reflects the spoken and written language used by professionals in a specific medical specialty, as developed by Philips Speech Recognition Systems.