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Physicians Look to Use More Products from IVR Service Providers to Improve Patient Care

By Ed Silverstein, TMCnet Contributor

Physicians are ready to use more products from IVR service providers to improve patient care.

Already, voice recognition technology developers are introducing IVR products which let doctors document patient information quickly and thoroughly.

USA Today reports that Nuance (News - Alert) has a voice solution placed in electronic medical records at hospitals. It confirms important details on the patient, looks for potential issues and raises possible questions, Nick Van Terheyden of Nuance told USA Today.

In addition, M-Modal is offering a similar product for mobile devices. It is designed with physician preferences in mind. "Physicians prefer to narrate and dictate. They don't want to point and click,” Juergen Fritsch, co-founder of M-Modal, told USA Today.

Reda Chouffani, who specializes in the IVR sector as applied to medicine, told USA Today that new devices can “do things they couldn't before, like prescribing (medication). Jaws were dropping at a (recent industry) conference."

Dictation by physicians is nothing new for patient records. It has included details on patient care, summaries, orders and prescriptions, USA Today reported. But it has been transcribed by someone else. New software lets it be transcribed directly from the dictation. The software is advancing even further as Nuance is testing products at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to provide data mining and "intelligence" software.

So when a doctor now writes a note for a record on heart failure and doesn’t say the level of acuity, she/he is asked by a prompt for details on whether it was diastolic or systolic, Rasu Shrestha of UPMC, told USA Today. "The idea is to get actionable data while you're interacting with the patient," Shrestha added.

M-Modal's new software is being tested at the University of California-Irvine Medical Center, as well. It lets doctors use their voice to dictate info onto files in electronic records. The health center will use iPads eventually for the process, USA Today said.

In a related matter, Nuance will partner with IBM (News - Alert) to use IBM's Watson computing system for health-care uses, according to TMCnet. That is the software which was used in the Jeopardy! TV show. It will let doctors see what related information can be found about patients from other documents, cases and journal articles. It will be easy to use, the companies said.