A new dictation technology at area hospitals benefits both doctors and patients.

Kishwaukee Community Hospital, 1 Kish Hospital Drive, and Valley West Community Hospital, 11 E. Pleasant Ave. in Sandwich, will replace their old dictation technology with the new Nuance eScription system.

Dictation technology is used to transfer notes from the doctor to go into medical records, said Tamara Farrell, internal communications specialist for Marketing and Public Relations at KishHealth System.

Farrell said traditionally, dictation technology entails a doctor talking into a phone and a transcriptionist writing what is recorded. Using the new eScription system will get the information transferred to the medical records quicker.

The Nuance eScription technology runs through voice recognition technology and transcribes a draft of the report, which is then edited by the transcriptionist, said Christine Cain, manager of Health Information Management at Valley West Community Hospital. Cain said with this new technology, the transcriptionist is in more of an editor position. Instead of having the transcriptionist write from only an audio recording, he or she will now have a script from the new dictation technology to edit and from which to compose a final report.

Cain said she is very excited about the implementation of speech recognition.

“I believe we have chosen the best speech-recognition platform in the industry, allowing us to capture as high as 90 percent voice recognition from our dictators,” Cain said.

This technology is expected to speed up the transcription process.

“The time to [edit the script] is about half of the time it takes to write a report,” Cain said.

In addition to making the work quicker for the transcriptionist, the new technology is also expected to improve patient care.

“[Nuance eScription] will make information available as quickly as it can be,” Cain said.

Cain said the system will make the hospitals able to provide reports that are even better than industry benchmarks.

Cain also said the system has a few bugs to work out. She said some physicians or “early adopters” of the program will try out the technology and give feedback on the Nuance eScription system.