SIIM 2008 - GE Healthcare and M*Modal have announced a partnership agreement to deliver the next generation of radiology reporting technology.

GE Healthcare IT, has announced a partnership agreement with M*Modal, a leading provider of advanced speech understanding solutions, to deliver the next generation of radiology reporting technology. The announcement was made at the 2008 Annual Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) Conference being held May 15-18 in Seattle, WA.

With the aim to transition the industry from speech recognition to speech understanding, the agreement will incorporate M*Modal's advanced speech technology, AnyModal^TM Conversational Documentation Services (CDS), as part of GE's Centricity RIS-IC Reporting module. The solution will aim to benefit physicians and radiologists with higher process efficiency, more accurate clinical documentation and dictation without changes in workflow. In addition, the technology is designed to continually learn, so the more it is used, the more accurate it becomes.

"M*Modal's unique speech understanding solution, AnyModal CDS, offers a unique combination of speech recognition and natural language understanding that captures a physician's meaning, transforming spoken dictation into accurate, complete, and meaningful healthcare documentation," said Don Woodlock, Vice President and General Manager, GE Healthcare IT. "That advanced speech understanding capability embedded in GE Healthcare's Centricity Imaging RIS-IC radiology information system makes this a winning combination for both companies - but most of all, for physicians and their patients."

"Our partnership with a market leader like GE Healthcare accelerates the adoption of directly capturing structured and encoded data from Radiology reporting by making speech an integral part of the radiology workflow. At every step of the radiology process, physicians and hospitals capture rich patient data, because our speech understanding technology is embedded in Centricity RIS-IC," said Michael Finke, CEO of M*Modal. "Ultimately, the ability to share highly accurate, structured, encoded clinical documents improves the efficiency of healthcare providers, and better information drives improved patient care," he concludes.

By combining AnyModal CDS within Centricity RIS-IC, physicians will now be able to dictate without any change in workflow. The patented speech understanding services transform the spoken dictation into a draft report, automatically structured and encoded according to the healthcare provider's documentation rules. Documents are generated in a semantically interoperable HL7 CDA format to allow for streamlined report sharing between practitioners and facilities.