Nuance Expands Medical Transcription Services
Nuance Communications today announced an expansion of its Enterprise Express Speech System, the company’s speech-assisted transcription service. Using Nuance’s Dragon speech-to-text capabilities, coupled with technology from Dictaphone, the company says its new services will help companies save time and money while increasing productivity and accuracy.
The product is geared toward medical transcriptionists who would review and edit documents produced by Nuance’s Dragon software, rather than transcribing the dictated reports from scratch. The company also noted that the product can evolve as it is used (for example, using Dictaphone’s new Smart ReWrite technology, the solution can learn new medical technology and the structure and style of the physician’s documents, automatically correct grammatical mistakes, handle rephrasing, and customize formatting.
The solution comes in response to heightened demand from the healthcare industry for an enterprisewide solution that helps speed medical report creation and decrease costs without impacting physician workload or productivity. Customers can deploy the new Enterprise Express Speech System within their own facility or use Dictaphone’s iChart hosted service.
"Incorporating speech technology to speed our report creation process without changing our physicians’ normal dictation behavior was a top priority of ours," said Sandra Hardin, transcription manager for the health information management department at Carolinas Medical Center Northeast. "Through the use of the Enterprise Express Speech System we’ve already realized benefits. Our report turnaround time is averaging 24 hours or less; cutting in half what it was before. Additionally, despite the fact that we are experiencing a heavier amount of dictation volume, we are getting significantly more work done with some transcriptionists increasing their workload by up to 75 percent."
The company also pointed to the success of its subsidiary, Focus Informatics, an editing service that reviews transcriptions for accuracy. Nuance acquired Focus Infomatics in March, and has since expanded the company’s offshore facilities with four new branches in India. The company delivers all its transcriptions via the Internet.
"Dictaphone has a full range of speech-recognition solutions to help healthcare organizations improve the clinical documentation process, while lowering costs and enhancing operational efficiency," says Peter Durlach, senior vice president of marketing and product strategy at Nuance’s Dictaphone Healthcare Solutions unit. "The significantly enhanced capabilities of our new Enterprise Express Speech System are based on years of development and build on our philosophy of maximizing productivity to deliver highly accurate medical reports without impacting workflow, so that providers will experience zero change to their daily process, while the organization reaps significant rewards."