The 675-bed Asklepios Fachklinikum Brandenburg is the biggest psychiatric and neurological hospital in the State of Brandenburg, Germany. Digital dictation has been the standard there for several years. The hospital’s motto: “A microphone at every doctor’s PC workstation”. Because the volume of written material is high: doctors have to dictate not only diagnostic summaries, but also regular, long documentation on frequently returning patients. “We have been relying on Philips hardware here since the very beginning and we provide our doctors and psychologists with SpeechMike dictation microphones that were specially developed for use in hospitals,” says Roland Poot, the hospital’s Head of IT. The people in Brandenburg use the application FD-Klinika from SYSTEMA as their hospital information system (HIS), with FD-Archiv from Optimal Systems as the integrated document management system. The Philips solution fits seamlessly into this established IT landscape. The dictation application is started from the HIS; the doctor navigates the recorder using the key controls on his SpeechMike and upon completion the dictation is transferred to the workflow in the integrated HIS/DMS solution. The hospital’s IT team faced new technical challenges when it upgraded to Citrix XenApp 5 in the spring of 2011. The reason for introducing Citrix: as in many hospitals, the people in Brandenburg also wanted to migrate away from their fat clients and to provide their doctors and employees with standardized, easy-to-maintain thin client hospital workstations.

The latest Philips technology satisfies all the preconditions for terminal server and Citrix environments

To ensure that digital dictation would continue to work smoothly in this environment, it was necessary to upgrade from the original Philips dictation solution to the latest version of SpeechExec Enterprise. This contains all the latest drivers that make it possible to use the SpeechMikes with thin clients. However, a complete upgrade to SpeechExec Enterprise was not required, since the hospital already manages its entire dictation workflow using the combined HIS/DMS solution. “Bohnhoff Soft- und Hardware Systeme GmbH therefore came up with a solution that perfectly fits our situation using the Philips Software Developer Kit,” says Roland Poot. The hospital only uses the Philips software’s recorder function, which is still launched from the DMS system. There are approximately 100 doctors and psychologists at the Asklepios Fachklinikum Brandenburg. The IT department provides each Citrix workstation with digital dictation capability, both via SpeechMike and, as previously, using the HIS-integrated recorder function. As a rule, users hardly even notice the switchover to terminal/Citrix server – except for the fact that their PCs have now shrunk to thin clients. Thanks to the new recorder function, they can now handle the entire dictation process in the new server environment.

"Bohnhoff Soft- und Hardware Systeme GmbH came up with a solution that perfectly fits our situation using the Philips Software Developer Kit." Roland Poot, Head of IT

Recorder can be closed by pressing a button on the dictation device

Philips features such as the End-of-Letter button make the device easy to work with – this SpeechMike feature was added to the new recorder by our implementation partner, Bohnhoff. This makes it possible to end dictations by pressing a button on the dictation device, automatically closing the recorder application and retrieving the next patient file for further processing. A particular advantage of this solution: while other dictation systems still use speech files in wave format, Philips makes it possible to record and then manage files in the new dss. and dss.pro standard (Digital Speech Standard), a simple and standardized format for digital voice recordings. Although some third-party manufacturers also make dictation devices that record in dss format, the dictation solutions that are used after they are downloaded from the device then convert them back into wave format. This standard is still in widespread use in hospitals. However, voice files are quite big, which leads to high data traffic that, consequently, often overloads networks. By contrast, the dss standard compresses the files to a minimal size. The integrated Philips solution consisting of the dictation device and the recorder now facilitates uninterrupted work with dss or dss.pro files. The dss standard’s encryption technology is yet another advantage. It guarantees that sensitive information will be handled securely – particularly in the hospital setting, where the confidentiality of patient data is an important factor!