Impact of tightly coupled PACS/speech recognition on report turnaround time in the radiology department.

As medical reimbursements decline in real dollars, solid evidence of potential cost savings and improved service is needed to justify purchasing new health care equipment. Many picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) and speech recognition studies have examined the cost savings implied by their adoption, and some studies have investigated service improvement as defined by shortened report turnaround times (RTT). However, it is not clear what synergy is possible with adoption of tightly coupled PACS/speech recognition and how that would impact RTT. A survey of more than 40 North American sites was undertaken to quantify the manpower and RTT efficacy of four possible workflows: film with transcription, film with speech recognition, PACS with transcription, and PACS with speech recognition (as distinct applications or tightly coupled). Twenty-five percent of sites completed the full survey.