Hawkesbury District General Hospital - Canada

Bilingual document creation

In 2004, the hospital decided to replace their old tape-based system with a digital platform offering advanced workflow management capability. After evaluating various vendors, they soon found out that Crescendo provided the technology best-suited to meet their specific needs. "While others products were offering too many functions that we would never end up using, DigiScribe-XL and MedRite-XL were targeted, easy to use and less expensive" explains Sara Van der Bijl, Coordinator, Management Information Systems. "But beyond the solidity of their technology, Crescendo understood our bilingual culture, which soon turned out to be another key success factor in the project," adds Mrs. Van der Bijl. At the Hôpital Général de Hawkesbury, all Transcriptionists work in both English and French, depending on the language the Author is dictating their report in, hence the need to have the DigiScribe-XL and MedRite-XL interfaces available in both languages. "As a result, the document creation process is just as efficient in both languages, and so should it be. In no manner should the patient's and/or physician's language have an impact on the quality of healthcare. And Crescendo understands that." highlights Mrs. Van der Bijl.

"We also know that Crescendo is the only vendor working on the development of dedicated French Canadian speech recognition for General Medicine and Radiology; another key component in our vision of a state-of-the-art, bilingual healthcare facility." adds Mrs. Van der Bijl. "All doctors, especially in Radiology and ER, look forward very much to seeing this new technology implemented throughout the hospital."

Improving turnaround time and reliability of data

The switch from tape to digital was 95% transparent for the forty dictating physicians who still use phones to dictate their reports. But in the background, the new DigiScribe-XL system automatically manages priorities and routing, while seamlessly importing demographic information through the ADT interface. Not only is the hospital now able to manage its transcription resources as a pool, it also benefits from more reliable medical data thanks to reduced manual entry.

Powerful distribution capabilities

"Once we start printing on the nursing wards for in-patient reports, no nurses should be running down the hallway for reports anymore, since the system automatically takes care of sending the right reports to the right printers in the right departments. This process has been tested and is just about to go in production. This new printing process makes an invaluable difference to our work environment, as people don't have to go get the information anymore; it is the information that gets to people." goes on to comment Mrs. Van der Bijl.

What's next

"Next on our wish list is bilingual Speech Recognition in Radiology and ER. We would also like to roll out PC dictation together with a full PACS and RIS interface to further accelerate the Radiology examination process", concludes Mrs. Van der Bijl.