When it comes to voice and language solutions for both businesses and consumers, Nuance Communications has its hands on a lot of things on a global scale – from voice-based biometrics to cloud-based call center software to numerous deals with smartphone and PC manufacturers to a great deal of electronic medical health record efforts – and much in between. So it was certainly no surprise to hear earlier today that Nuance has released a next generation of its voice recognition platform - Dragon Medical 360�Network Edition 2.0.
The platform is specifically designed for clinicians in need of documenting clinical care using multiple devices and electronic health records (EHRs) across a hospital or health system, and utilizes the newest version of Nuance’s excellent speech engine. With the new release clinicians will now be able to make use of enhanced real-time dictation on any desktop, laptop or mobile device. Of growing importance clinicians will also be able to utilize the new release within virtualized, browser-based and client-server EHR environments.
Nuance claims that by employing its latest advancements in voice and natural language understanding technologies, Dragon Medical 360 | Network Edition 2.0 will offer a significantly higher level of accuracy out of the box - up to a claimed 98 percent or better, all of it with no voice training required. In addition, Nuance claims that clinicians will experience 20 percent fewer errors than they were seeing with the prior version of Network Edition.
Assuming the claims are accurate, and there is no reason to believe the platform doesn’t deliver substantial levels of improvement, clinicians can expect to see a non-trivial increase in positive and consistent experiences. This in turn should lead to a much greater rate of EHR-based adoption of the technology. Clinicians already using these solutions in their everyday routines will now find it much easier to document patient care from any device using Dragon Medical directly in both desktop and mobile EHRs, including Cerner’s PowerChart Touch and Epic’s Haiku and Canto.
This is especially important within today’s healthcare world, which continues to see consolidation and an ever-growing reliance on HER to create efficiencies and much more accuracy in both capturing and storing patient information. In particular, as more hospitals merge and health systems deploy EHR physician documentation software across multiple IT environments, clinicians need to maintain focus on delivering patient care instead of documenting that care. In seeking to create both new efficiencies and far greater accuracy clinicians and doctors will indeed have that critical time to spend with patients we cannot overstress the benefits in terms of return in investment in delivering significant increases in the4 quality of medical care on the front lines – by which we mean “patient lives.” More direct time for interacting with patients has been proven time and time again to be a life-saving process.
Designed as well to meet the constantly shifting needs of health care providers, the new platform delivers support for all types of virtualized network environments, and allows these organizations to seamlessly integrate with most if not all HER platforms. This includes accelerating clinical documentation capture in Allscripts, Cerner, eClinicalWorks, Epic, Meditech, NextGen and many others. Nearly 300,000 physicians now rely on Dragon Medical 360. The new release should bring many more to the table.
Peter Malloy, CIO, Cheshire Medical Center/Dartmouth-Hitchcock Keene makes this pretty clear when he says, “For physicians, it’s all about maximizing time and getting through their busy day without having to leave the office with homework. No one wants to spend two to three hours at the end of a shift documenting patient care. Even our most skeptical physicians, including those who speak rapidly or have strong accents, are seeing the benefits of dictating with Dragon Medical Network Edition 2.0. Basically, doctors are able to improve their efficiency. The benefit for physicians and medical recordkeeping is faster, end-to-end completion of their notes.”
Cindy Peterson, vice president and CIO, Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital, which has deployed Dragon Medical 360 | Network Edition with its Meditech EHR, adds that, “With increasing patient volumes, we need to maximize our time, so mobility and usability are king. We want to spend our time treating our patients, not entering information about them – that is something we can do on the go. Dragon Medical fits into our workflow, it doesn’t determine it.”
We’re just skimming the surface here of course. Nuance integrates with numerous EHR vendors on an international scale. We hope to see many more hospitals – especially those moving to make use of mobile technology – come into the fold with both Nuance technology and Nuance competitors. Those competitors in the meantime will need to ensure they can compete head on with Nuance.
Nuance has just raised the bar significantly – we look forward to seeing who else is able to jump over that bar.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
