80 Percent Improvement in Time Spent On Benign Prostate Reports, Thanks to VoiceOver PRO

The Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at  Endeavor Health (formerly known as NorthShore University HealthSystem) in Evanston, Ill. provides inpatient, outpatient and reference lab services to the four hospitals in the health system, more than 100 medical group offices, private physician offices, and other healthcare facilities in the Chicago area. 

"Here at the Endeavor legacy site, we do approximately 100,000 anatomic pathology cases per year, in which we're dictating and diagnosing," says Dr. John Groth, a NorthShore pathologist. "The vast majority of those cases are gastrointestinal, followed by gynecologic, uterine, and then a mixture of a variety of other types."

A DECADE OF USING VOICEOVER

Endeavor began working with Voicebrook and using VoiceOver reporting software more than a decade ago.

"At the time, we were really having trouble filling our transcription pool, finding people that really were skilled at medical transcription and keeping people for a long enough period to get used to our system," says Dr. William Watkin, who served as the director of anatomic pathology at Endeavor for 26 years. "We met with Voicebrook, and we've really never looked back. We've used VoiceOver now since 2011. We implemented the system within three weeks and never had to use transcription again."

Dr. Watkin notes that the staff adjusted quickly to using VoiceOver and the laboratory quickly saw major efficiency gains.

"It was liberating," Dr. Watkin says. "In the days when we had transcription, especially when we were understaffed, we had to wait hours and hours to get our reports typed. But with VoiceOver, we were able to essentially just do the report right there and sign it out within a minute. We never had to wait, and we never had to worry about whether the typist had accurately typed what we had just dictated. It was really great."

In 2019, Endeavor's anatomic pathology department began an upgrade to Voicebrook’s newest software application, VoiceOver PRO. Today at the legacy site, there are more than 40 users on VoiceOver PRO, from pathologists, to assistants, to residents, to technicians.

Leveling Up

Dr. Groth joined Endeavor as a pathologist that same year, and immediately saw PRO’s potential for more opportunities and functionalities.

"It’s no longer just a dictation system – it’s a workflow solution," Dr. Groth explains. "It can be customized to the individual lab, tailoring it to the workflow of that particular lab and their particular LIS, working on the interplay between all of these systems. And with that, it can then become an educational tool and teaching tool. It becomes so much more than just simply reporting results."

Dr. Groth began thinking about how NorthShore could really leverage the benefits of PRO. The pathology department had an institutional goal of implementing more global templates for the lab as a whole. Having global templates would enable standardization, creating a common tone and common language in their pathology reports. Dr. Groth worked with the Voicebrook team to establish these templates, starting with the prostate.

"The main template we built with Voicebrook was the prostate one, where basically we had comments and things linked to diagnosis. Before we did this, you had to know where all the templates were and what they were, and give the command to insert those templates. But now if we use the diagnostic template, we actually have the common templates right there and just tell them what to say."

That means users don’t have to hunt for the template and learn yet another command. For example, for a small focus of atypical glands suspicious for adenocarcinoma, a user doesn't have to say the specific command, "Insert the atyp comment." Rather, they can just say the generic command "build comment" and it’s automatically linked to that diagnosis.

"Once we started doing that, I think it was a turning point because then people didn't have to remember all of these templates and they were just literally linked to the diagnosis," Dr. Groth says. "It was also an encouragement to use the diagnostic template, because then you didn't have to know where all these other things were. It was just already there."