[Voice recognition applied to ICU medical reports]

Medical reports in ICU are usually tape recorded and then typed by transcriptionist. Digital voice recognition (DVR) has considerably improved and may be a time saving method. The purpose of this study was to test IBM Viavoice (Pro Edition, Release 8, French version) for the generation of medical reports in a surgical intensive care unit.

A senior resident (Int) in anaesthesia, a senior academic (AS) anaesthesiologist and a confirmed medical secretary (Sec) all working in the same surgical ICU participated to the study. First, Int and AS trained Viavoice according to the software requirements. Then 60 medical records (text files) served to automatically train the software. For the study, we prospectively used 20 consecutive medical records, which had been dictated on tape by either Int or AS. The transcription time by Sec, the number of typing errors and time needed for corrections were recorded. Int and AS with Viavoice processed the same records. Turnaround time and errors were assessed for comparison to Sec work.

Accuracy was 97, 92 and 95% for Sec, Int and AS, respectively. Transcription by Viavoice was always significantly faster whatever the speaker than conventional transcription by a secretary. However, Int required significantly longer time to correct recorded text than did Sec and AS. The total turnaround time was significantly faster for AS than Sec (p < 0.01) but Int did not differ from Sec. The performance of Viavoice did not rise with the number of records.

Viavoice is as efficient as a confirmed transcriptionist.