Histopathology Department at Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust Expands TalkingPoint Use

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.

Derriford Hospital had previously developed template reports, consisting of standard macroscopic descriptions. However, this system was limited to basic specimens, whereas TalkingPoint can deal with any report type. 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.

To aid the pathology pathway at Derriford, TalkingPoint automatically generates an instant workload report for the main laboratory. Previously, staff physically counted the specimen requests; using TalkingPoint, a button click reveals the lab workload for the following day on screen to allow demand and capacity planning in the laboratory.

TalkingPoint’s Pathology SR workflow system provides a highly ergonomic solution to meet the demanding cut-up environment, enabling Biomedical Scientists to work unassisted. Excellent speech recognition accuracy is assured by the unique pathology vocabulary. TalkingPoint also integrates with many pathology reporting systems including Apex, Copath, LabTrack, MediTech, Technidata and Winpath.