Nuance Connects Dragon Customers
Speech and imaging solutions provider Nuance Communications has found a vital connection with the release of DragonConnect, a software layer that links the capabilities of Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical with Dictaphone's Enterprise Express integrated dictation and transcription solutions.
About a year ago, Nuance acquired Dictaphone, along with its Enterprise Express family of products. Until now, Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition engine and Dictaphone's Enterprise Express suite of products, which includes EXVoice and EXText, were separate products that had no link or interaction with one another. DragonConnect does just what its name suggests.
"The goal of this product is to make a bridge between the Dragon product and the Dictaphone enterprise products, so that the different products of the company are now fully connected to each other," says Frederik Brabant, senior product manager for Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical.
DragonConnect gives Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical customers the ability to send speech-generated reports and dictated audio files to transcription services for review or transcription. Once they have dictated into the EMR, the text pops up on the screen and they can send the files using their voice or by clicking a button in the system.
DragonConnect Version 1.0 will support two integrated workflows. The first workflow is DragonConnect and EXVoice, where users of Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical will be able to send a full dictated audio report to the EXVoice dictation system via voice command or microphone control. In this situation, the audio is sent to a transcriptionist, who then transcribes the text into the customer's information system. The second workflow is DragonConnect and EXVoice/EXText. Here, the users send a full dictated report, including audio and text recognized by Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical, to the EXText transcription system. The report is sent by voice command or microphone control and is routed to a transcriptionist for editing and correction on the EXText platform. Once the transcribed text is finalized, the transcriptionist can sign off on the document in EXText and upload it the customer's information system.
In addition to saving Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical users time by enabling them to pass reviewing/editing steps on to transcriptionists, the system also provides a fail-safe for customers not yet using speech. "There are users in the market today who are scared to use speech recognition. For users who didn't work with DNS, this product gives them an easy way to transition to using speech recognition because it gives them a fallback to their old dictation methods using a transcriptionist," Brabant explains. "We hope it will speed up the adoption of speech recognition in the healthcare market today.
"Speech recognition technology provides several key benefits for both payer and provider organizations in the healthcare market," notes Daniel Hong, lead analyst at Datamonitor. "By introducing new automation capabilities in transcription, customer care, and reporting, speech provides the ability to reduce costs and improve processes across daily operations. This announcement by Nuance demonstrates the vendor's sharpening focus on speech automation in the healthcare market and showcases its transcription capabilities. Because grammars are more defined in healthcare, transcription through speech recognition will tend to be more accurate and therefore more commercially viable."
"This product will have an impact on how quickly information will be available in the EMR and how easy it will be accessible. It is the combination of the Dragon product with specialized medical vocabularies together with the option to opt out that gives physicians other opportunities when adopting speech technologies," Brabant states.