Time, Money, and Lives Blog

Scrolling through the lists of our Tips and Tricks blogs, you can probably gather how much value we place in the use of templates for efficient and accurate dictation using speech recognition in your AP environment. A couple weeks ago, Lindsey Pitsch wrote a blog called, "You Use Templates Without Even Knowing - Make it Official," and we received a lot of interest from our clients.

For some basics in templates and template building, you can look at posts by my coworkers, Melanie and Nick, and you can even download samples of gross templates. This time, though, I’d like to take the opportunity to build on to the basics by instructing on some advanced template functionality. Specifically, I'd like to show you how two "special characters" can be built into template fields.

As has frequently been mentioned in this blog, speech recognition technology is not an effective solution for Pathology Reporting when used by itself.  However, when combined with the appropriate hardware, pathology templates, devices, and workflow integration it is proven to help save time and money, and assist Pathologists in providing the highest standard of diagnostic care for their patients. I realize that these are just words to most, and absent seeing how this comes together in a lab environment it is difficult to understand.  That said, for the purposes of this blog, I wanted to share how just one voice command can be used to improve workflow, accuracy of dictation, and ultimately save time.

Imagine you’re overhearing a conversation between two people and, in the middle of the discussion, one of the people says “colon”.  If you were busy checking a new text message on your phone or reading the latest tweet or blog from Voicebrook and this was ALL you heard, you might not know if this person is talking about the symbol, the anatomical structure, or a European colonial settler (seriously).  Now, had we also known that the word prior to “colon” was “ascending”, and that the two people speaking were pathologist assistants in the gross room, than those contextual clues would have made it easier for us to determine the correct meaning of this word.