Nuance Healthcare Expands Dragon Medical Portfolio

Nuance Communications today unveiled Dragon Medical Practice Edition, the latest addition to the Dragon Medical portfolio of medical speech recognition solutions.

Dragon Medical solutions have been proven to support clinicians at healthcare organizations of all sizes in using electronic health records (EHR) and accelerating Meaningful Use.

Like its predecessors, Dragon Medical Practice Edition will help clinicians and healthcare organizations create medical notes directly into any EHR in real time. Dragon Medical Practice Edition yields a 15 percent improvement in accuracy over previous Dragon Medical releases and contains additional features that will be especially beneficial to physicians in small practices, which make up an estimated 40 percent of the total U.S. physician population.

"I rely on the EHR for point-and-click data capture, but for subjective information, as well as my conclusions and impressions, I use Dragon Medical. It allows me to capture the unique, patient narrative and add detail that simply cannot be documented with templates," says Dr. Andrew Fireman of AMS Cardiology, a 17-physician cardiology practice based in Abington, Penn. "Since speech-enabling our EHR, I have also been able to spend less time editing medical records and more time focusing on patient care."

Dragon Medical is helping more than 20 percent of small practices make the transition to EHRs while saving as much as $10,000 per clinician per year in reduced medical transcription costs, decreasing report turnaround time, and improving the comprehensiveness of patient medical records, which leads to more accurate reimbursement.

"Dragon Medical is a proven EHR-support solution that helps clinicians to fully and efficiently capture patient data as part of the medical record," said Evan Grossman, vice president of product strategy at athenahealth. "Incorporating speech recognition software from Nuance as part of the athenahealth's cloud-based EHR service, athenaClinicals, is best practice and will deliver tremendous value to our customers as they work to create high-quality, real-time patient documentation."

Beyond the cost savings, Dragon Medical Practice Edition can save clinicians 40-60 minutes per day on documentation and supports more detailed documentation of patients' histories of present illnesses, more flexible review of symptoms, and more descriptive assessment and care plans. With Dragon Medical, clinicians can document and share patient findings and their decision-making process directly in the EHR system and across the care team.

"Dragon Medical Practice Edition is a strong addition to the Nuance Healthcare family of clinical understanding solutions. It provides new features to assist physicians in capturing the full patient narrative by voice directly into any EHR," states Carina Edwards, vice president of healthcare solutions marketing at Nuance. "As physicians in small practices face financial, legal, and technological barriers to EHR adoption, Dragon Medical Practice Edition is a cost-effective and reliable solution to help them achieve Meaningful Use."

New features added in to Dragon Medical Practice Edition, based on clinician feedback, include the following:

• Smart Configuration: Improved recognition performance on everything from netbooks to high-powered servers. This capability takes full advantage of advances in hardware and runs in multiple-threads automatically when multi-core hardware is detected. This provides better recognition performance and translates into faster dictation and improved turnaround time on patient documentation.
• Recognition Analytics: Dragon Medical Practice Edition now automatically detects poor audio input caused by incorrect microphone connection or placement, background noise, and when the microphone is out of range or low on battery. When any of these issues are detected, Dragon will alert the user and offer advice to remedy. By alerting the user, Dragon Medical reduces the number of misrecognitions and improves the accuracy of the dictations.

Dragon Medical users have access to nearly 60 medical vocabularies and eight regional accent support models. Dragon Medical offers customizable commands such as Voice Shortcuts and DragonTemplates that help clinicians streamline the creation of Progress Notes, HPI Assessments, Consultation and Referral Letters, as well as other Care Plan documentation.

Dragon Medical Practice Edition is available for purchase by practices of 24 or less physicians.