BURLINGTON, MA – Nuance Communications has launched Dragon Medical Practice Edition, the latest addition to its portfolio of medical speech recognition solutions.
With Medical Practice Edition, Nuance seeks to help clinicians create medical notes directly into any EHR in real-time. With Dragon's real-time, voice-driven clinical documentation, clinicians are empowered to capture a more thorough patient story without sacrificing time.
[See also: Nuance buys Webmedx.]
Officials say 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.
Dragon Medical Practice Edition "provides new features to assist physicians in capturing the full patient narrative by voice directly into any EHR," said Carina Edwards, vice president, healthcare solutions marketing at Nuance Communications. "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."
[See also: Nuance and IBM collaborate on clinical language understanding .]
Nuance officials say 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. The technology also helps decrease report turnaround time and improve the comprehensiveness of patient medical records, leading to more accurate reimbursement.
"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," said Andrew Fireman, MD, of AMS Cardiology, a 17 physician cardiology practice based in Abington, Pa.. "It allows me to capture the unique, patient narrative and add detail that simply cannot be documented with templates."
New features of Dragon Medical Practice Edition include improved recognition performance on everything from netbooks to high-powered servers, through state-of-the-art technology which optimizes the software's configuration; and recognition analytics, which 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.
"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, athenahealth. "Incorporating speech recognition software from Nuance as part of the athenahealth's cloud-based EHR service, athenaClinicals … will deliver tremendous value to our customers as they work to create high-quality, real-time patient documentation."
