Nuance Unveils Dragon Medical Mobile Apps For Smart Phones
Nuance Communications today unveiled an advanced suite of Dragon Medical Mobile technologies and solutions for the healthcare industry.
Nuance is extending its mobile speech technologies to the healthcare industry, building on its Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search consumer apps for the iPhone, which are powered by Dragon NaturallySpeaking software. By applying its speech recognition and capture capabilities to smartphones, Nuance can help physicians, nurses, and other healthcare workers access clinical information and document patient encounters using their mobile devices, the company said.
The features that are being unveiled include Dragon Medical Mobile Dictation. The app allows clinicians to dictate patient notes, email, and text messages instead of typing them on a mobile device. With Dragon Medical Mobile Dictation, clinicians can dictate and capture information via a smartphone in rea ltime without having to return to the desktop, or rely on the keyboard or touch screen. Since Dragon Medical Mobile Dictation is a server-based app, all of the speech recognition is performed in the cloud using advanced real-time streaming capabilities.
Nuance is also unveiling Dragon Medical Mobile Search, a voice-powered solution that allows clinicians to search for medical information. Using the same server-based speech recognition technology as the Dragon Medical Mobile Dictation app, the Search app will allow clinicians to speak a request to conduct searches on various medical Web sites. A unique display carousel will show search results simultaneously from a variety of Web sites, such as MedScape, MedLine, Epocrates, and Google. The app will also help identify correct coding information to ensure that clinical services are appropriately billed and accurately documented. Dragon Medical Mobile Search will be the first Dragon Medical Mobile App made available by April 30.
The company is also previewing Dragon Medical Mobile Recorder, a voice-capture app that will allow clinicians to conduct on-the-go dictation on a smartphone. Once recorded, the clinicians’ voice files are forwarded through Nuance’s background speech recognition technology and onto transcriptio,n where a high-quality draft document is created and then sent back to the clinician for review and sign-off. The Dragon Medical Recorder app is designed for healthcare organizations that leverage either of Nuance’s enterprise-wide speech-enabled dictation and transcription solutions, eScription or the Dictaphone Enterprise Speech System.
Additionally, Nuance is unveiling a Dragon Medical Mobile software development kit that will be offered to third-party healthcare information technology companies and partners. This SDK will allow developers, including EHR vendors, to build solutions that can incorporate Nuance’s Dragon Medical Mobile capabilities. Eclipsys is the first healthcare information technology company to embed Dragon Medical Mobile SDK within its mobile application suite to enable speech-driven navigation and clinical documentation. This feature is part of a third-generation mobile version of Eclipsys’ Sunrise Clinical Manager EHR system for the iPhone.
"Nuance has helped revolutionize the mobile experience by providing people with simple, intuitive, and easy-to-use voice-powered capabilities on their smartphones and other devices," Peter Durlach, senior vice president of marketing and product strategy at Nuance Healthcare, said in a statement. "With the innovative solutions we're showcasing this week, Nuance is helping bring the power of mobile speech to the healthcare community and make clinical documentation and information access more efficient for the clinician. Whether quickly documenting a patient encounter while rounding, searching the Internet for medical information, or sending a quick spoken text message about a patient’s condition to a colleague, Nuance's Dragon Medical Mobile solutions will speed up and simplify the process."