Radiologists at Saint Louise Regional Hospital spend hours every
day filing medical imaging reports. Thanks to the efforts of
Partners for Heathcare Excellence, a fundraising campaign aimed at
South County’s wealthiest donors, they’re about to get some highly
sophisticated help.
Gilroy – Radiologists at Saint Louise Regional Hospital spend hours every day filing medical imaging reports. Thanks to the efforts of Partners for Heathcare Excellence, a fundraising campaign aimed at South County’s wealthiest donors, they’re about to get some highly sophisticated help.
Dr. Richard Porzio, director of the Radiology Department, said his staff run anywhere from 80 to 130 X-rays, CT scans and ultrasounds a day, with reports on them each taking two to three hours to complete. Now the hospital is close to acquiring a high-tech transcription service worth $187,000 that will enable doctors to speak their reports into a device that immediately types them up.
This should cut down the time it takes to complete each report to less than an hour and help improve overall patient care, Porzio said.
Difficulties with getting nuances in speech and understanding context has long made voice recognition software ineffective, but the technology has finally caught up with medical administrative needs, Porzio said. The high cost can be attributed to the complexity of the software, which has highly sophisticated artificial intelligence qualities such as the ability to learn different doctors’ verbal styles and accents.
At a Wednesday night fund-raising reception and dinner at the hospital, $37,500 worth of donation pledges were made by hospital supporters Rob and Bill Christopher, Carl and Jerri Reinhardt, Charles and Joan Buckley, Warren Barham, Donald and Cheryl Vanni, Fernando and Ana Frederico and Michael Cox.
These funds added to the $87,000 previously donated by the Daughters of Charity Foundation. The recent contributions, plus those from others, leave the group $2,500 short a purchase and “moving on to the next piece of equipment,” said Don Christopher, garlic-grower and chairman of the fund-raiser.
The hospital has also set its eye on new birthing beds and a wound care center with an estimated cost of roughly $450,000.
Perry Shirley is an intern attending San Francisco State University. He can be reached at (408) 846-6452 or ps******@**********rs.com.
