Nuance Healthcare Development Platform Brings Medical Speech Recognition to the Cloud

Nuance Communications today made its medical speech recognition capabilities and latest advancements in Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) technology  available through the Nuance Healthcare Development Platform.

With this new cloud-based platform, third-party developers serving global markets can rapidly incorporate Nuance Healthcare technologies as part of a wide variety of healthcare applications, providing users with new capabilities for speech-driven clinical documentation, voice navigation, and automatic clinical fact extraction.

The Nuance Healthcare Development Platform supports multiple devices and operating systems. By providing all of the CPU-intensive speech and language processing in the cloud, this new platform enables healthcare independent software vendors and internal development teams at provider and payer organizations to seamlessly embed Nuance’s SpeechAnywhere capabilities and CLU functionality as part of browser-based applications, mobile applications, and thin-client desktop solutions. The flexible environment of this new platform as a service expands the delivery of Nuance’s speech and CLU technologies to empower healthcare organizations, physicians, interdisciplinary care teams, and patients to achieve better patient documentation, better processes, and better care.

“Dictation has proven to be among the most preferred, intuitive, and effective ways to document clinical information,” said Janet Dillione, executive vice president and general manager of Nuance Healthcare. “By expanding access to Nuance’s speech recognition and Clinical Language Understanding capabilities, the Nuance Healthcare Development Platform is enabling application developers to unleash an entire new ecosystem of healthcare applications that will help clinicians and patients create and use high quality clinical documentation better and smarter than ever before.”

The Nuance Healthcare Development Platform empowers developers to build a wide array of clinical solutions including ones that:

• Bring Cloud-based Speech Recognition to Smartphones, Tablets, PCs and Browser-based Applications – Enable physicians, nurses and other caregivers to dictate patient notes in real time into clinical applications, such as electronic health records (EHR), running on an array of devices, including the Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
• Convert Narrative Clinical Documentation to Structured Data within an EHR – CLU will automatically extract key, structured clinical data from clinicians’ dictated notes, such as patient complaints and allergies, physician-assessed diagnoses, medication and procedural treatments, and health-related habits.
• Automate Information Retrieval at the Point-of-Care – While at a patient’s bedside, in their offices or at home, clinicians can simply dictate  search queries to access desired information. Whether the clinician is looking for updated patient test results or clinical information from an EHR, clinical data repository, or other source of medical content, it can be easily accessed via a mobile device.
• Collect Patient Information – Deploy advanced speech capabilities on PCs, patient kiosks, and mobile devices to enable patients to speak their key medical information, including history of present illnesses, current medications, and allergies.

Industry leaders that have already integrated capabilities from the platform as part of their solutions include Epocrates and Calgary Scientific.

“ResolutionMD Mobile, powered by PureWeb, delivers secure, full-functionality advanced visualization of 2D and 3D, medical images and associated patient reports directly to mobile devices, including the iPhone and iPad. By incorporating Nuance’s new cloud-based speech recognition capabilities into the ResolutionMD workflow, clinicians will experience an enhanced level of efficiency,” said Randy Rountree, executive vice president of global sales and marketing at Calgary Scientific. “Our mobile development team was able to rapidly access the Nuance Healthcare Development Platform and easily incorporate cloud-based, real-time speech recognition as an upcoming feature of the ResolutionMD Mobile reporting functionality. Now, our customers will benefit from the ability to view images and create reports instantly via speech-recognized dictation from within the same app.”

Epocrates has incorporated Nuance’s SpeechAnywhere technology as part of its Web-based EHR solution. Aimed to meet the unique needs of solo and small group physician practices, Epocrates’ EHR solution incorporates Nuance-powered speech functionality, which enables physicians to  capture information any time, any where, and on any device.

The Healthcare Development Platform incorporates many advanced capabilities including:

• rapid application integration;
• flexible, multimodal applications;
• specialized medical speech and language models
• HIPPA supportive security; and
  
• support for multiple devices and operating platforms.