Nuance Healthcare Announces Winners of the 2012 Mobile Clinician Voice Challenge

Today, from HIMSS, Nuance Communications announced the winners of the 2012 Mobile Clinician Voice Challenge, a month-long event that called upon healthcare developers to voice-enable mobile or Web-based healthcare applications.

Judges reviewed all submissions based on pre-defined judging criteria that included innovation, functional implementation, workflow, patient care benefits, and visual appeal, and selected SparrowEDIS, developed by Montrue Technologies, as the grand prize winner.

SparrowEDIS is an emergency department information system for the iPad that allows doctors and nurses to dictate, through Nuance Healthcare-powered voice recognition technology, the clinical narrative at the point-of-care. With the added layer of medical voice recognition, clinicians can also check for prescription interaction issues, create prescription orders, and share discharge instructions at the bedside all through voice, helping to streamline emergency medicine workflow and improve patient safety. For more insight into the winning app from Montrue Technologies, visit:http://vimeo.com/35912556

"As an emergency doctor, I know access to the clinical narrative is crucial in enabling us to get a 360-degree view of a patient. I also know that speech recognition is the best way to capture this narrative in its fullest form, and in the most efficient fashion," said Brian Phelps, CEO and co-founder of Montrue Technologies, in statement. "By speech-enabling our app, SparrowEDIS, on Nuance's 360 | Development Platform, we are able to capture the essence of the patient doctor relationship."

Following grand-prize recognition, first prize in Nuance's Mobile Clinician Voice Challenge was awarded to healthcare application developer Remedy Systems. By speech-enabling its Deep Query Engine app, the company enabled physicians to interact and organize their practice via voice commands, much like a mobile, medical personal assistant. Second prize was given to WholeSlide, a technology company that creates novel tools for image viewing and analysis, for their educational program app. With WholeSlide's voice-enabled app, clinicians and researchers can annotate regions of the apps hosted histology, hematology, and pathology data via spoken form to quickly share with colleagues.

"What was evident from the broad range of speech-driven mobile applications submitted as part of the Mobile Clinician Voice Challenge is there's a need for a more integrated approach to the development process, and we're just starting to see a smart focus on apps that are truly user-friendly for the medical community," said Dr. Andres Jimenez, CEO of ImplementHIT, in a statement. "As a practicing physician and consultant working with large healthcare organizations to implement health IT, evaluating these new mobile apps from both perspectives helped me realize that speech-enabling apps will greatly facilitate adoption by healthcare providers."

The 2012 Mobile Clinician Voice Challenge Judging Panel was composed of the following:

• Mr. HIStalk, a blogger on hospital IT news, healthcare technology, and healthcare industry trends;
• Dr. Steven Zuber, chief medical information officer at Methodist Health System;
• Dr. Andres Jimenez, CEO of ImplementHIT;
• Janet Dillione, executive vice president and general manager of Nuance Healthcare; and
• Jonathon Dreyer, senior manager of mobile solutions marketing at Nuance Healthcare.

According to market research from RNCOS, physician adoption of mobile devices in healthcare is expected to reach 81 percent to 85 percent this year, heightening the need for intuitive, user-friendly healthcare applications that enhance clinicians' experiences, improve mobile workflows, and lead to better patient care. As part of the 2012 Mobile Clinician Voice Challenge, developers had access to the 360 | Development Platform (formerly the Nuance Healthcare Developer Program), which supports multiple devices and operating systems and enables developers to embed Nuance's SpeechAnywhere services into healthcare applications.

"Through access to Nuance's secure, cloud-based, medical speech recognition platform, developers were challenged to give mobile clinicians a voice," Dillone explained. "Developers stepped up to the challenge and delivered some truly innovative clinical applications, including disease management tools, diagnosis checklist systems, physician-patient interaction and communication tools, and practice management apps that will help mobile clinicians research, access, create, and share clinical information faster than ever before."