Nuance Releases Dragon Medical Enterprise Network Edition

Today Nuance Communications released a new solution, Dragon Medical Enterprise Network Edition, which is designed with larger medical practices—those with 25 practitioners or more—in mind since it provides not only dictation but support for Citrix-based EHR (electronic health record) environments and a centralized management console.

The company says the enterprise edition will yield better economic results, and seamlessly integrate within EHR systems.

In the Dragon Medical Enterprise Network edition, clinicians can dictate, navigate, and correct medical documents within an EHR using voice. Nuance says more than 150,000 clinicians have already chosen Dragon Medical as a method to create and manage documents.

“The introduction of Dragon Medical Enterprise Network Edition coincides with many health systems’ decisions to purchase and deploy EHR systems as they invest to achieve meaningful use incentives” said Janet Dillione, executive vice president and general manager of healthcare at Nuance, in a statement. “Without Dragon Medical as a key EHR input and navigation, we believe healthcare organizations will struggle to introduce EHRs as standard tool among clinicians due to reduced efficiency and lower quality patient notes. With this new Dragon Medical Enterprise Network Edition introduction, healthcare organizations can leverage speech recongition in the most cost-effective way to accelerate enterprise-wide EHR adoption by empowering physicians to document care in their own words.”

Nuance also contends that because it developed the solution with major commercial EHR systems and with collaboration of some EHR vendors, such as Cerner, Epic, and Allscripts, that many of the enhancements should be able to integrate easily.

Some of the other new features include:

• vSync, which creates a virtual channel between the the PC and a Citrix-bsed EHR client application, which allows physicians to switch between dictation and typing, play dictation to hear a recording, correct medical notes with voice commands.
• Centralized Enterprise Management Tools, a server-based management tool that provides the capability to administer Dragon Medical as an enterprise IT tool alongside the EHR. Organizations can manage their users and their options, monitor license activity, distribute macros, and automate software updates across the whole user base.
• Automated Updates also provide updates to vocabularies, which include new macro lists, medication lists, diagnoses lists, and disease lists, which update via a live feed. Administrators can update all areas with one click.
• Central User Profile Management: Using the Nuance Management Console, IT departments can now centrally manage individual Dragon Medical users’ profiles. Also, new security and password are available only in the Network edition. These security features ensure that a clinician’s voice is recognized when he or she begins a dictation.

“We’ve been using Dragon Medical Enterprise Network Edition alongside our Cerner EMR since April and have seen significant benefits. Not only are clinicians empowered to complete comprehensive, high-quality notes in real-time by speaking, but many tasks associated with the system are now automated,” said Steven Zuber,an internal medicine doctor at Methodist HealthWest and chief medical information officer at Methodist Physicians Clinic, in a statement. “For example, user profiles are automatically loaded. Now, clinicians can access their Dragon Medical profiles and user settings quickly without having to re-select preferences. We’ve also noticed that the profiles are optimized because of a number of updates occurring in the background. The optimization has simplified problem diagnosis and repair, improved recognition accuracy and most importantly reduced the time it takes to create and finalize a patient’s medical record. Dragon Medical Enterprise Network Edition works very well within a Citrix-based EHR environment; on average I’ve been able to save 30 minutes per day on documentation, carving out anywhere between 30 seconds to one minute from each record I create.”

Dragon’s Network edition has nearly 80 medical vocabularies available, as well as regional accent support models. It also offers customizable commands, shortcuts, and templates.

It is currently available for a promotional price for those who purchase the solution before September 30. There is also a license conversion pricing program for existing customers of the Dragon Medical Customer Network Edition. Also, as of October 1, Dragon Medical Enterprise Edition will no longer be offered for sale to new hospital customers or physician practices with 25 or more physicians, but Nuance will provide support and additional add-on licenses for purchase. For smaller practices of fewer than 25 physicians, Nuance says it will continue to offer Dragon Medical Box and Small Practice Editions.