Physicians at 22 Italian Hospitals to be Provided with Philips SpeechMagic

VIENNA -- The 22 hospitals in Italy’s Friuli-Venezia Giulia region will roll out Royal Philips Electronics’ speech recognition-based document creation platform powered by SpeechMagic.

With it, radiologists and pathologists will be able to produce medical reports instantly from every workstation attached to the regional system. Roaming profiles will facilitate the flexible deployment throughout the region by providing physicians with access to individual user and voice settings on every workstation, in every hospital.

The backup and recovery system will be centralized in the region’s capital, Trieste, for optimal data protection and reduced administration efforts.

"Allowing physicians to generate medical reports themselves will speed up the availability of accurate medical data," said Robert Thornton, commercial director of Philips Speech Recognition Systems. "Studies have shown that front-end speech recognition can improve report availability by up to 90 percent, reducing waiting times for physicians and patients alike."

The project is headed by Insiel S.p.A, an Italian supplier of infrastructure and services. Philips and GST are also developing a new Italian speech recognition vocabulary (ConText) with specialized terminology for pathologists.