Nuance Communications (News - Alert), a provider of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and speech recognition solutions, announced that Providence Health & Services has deployed Dragon Medical 360 | Network Edition across its healthcare enterprise.
With this deployment, Providence Health & Services makes medical voice recognition available at 27 hospitals and 250 clinics. The IVR deployment also supports Providence's rollout of the Epic electronic health record (EHR) system by empowering clinical staff to document and navigate the EHR by speaking.
"Dragon Medical builds upon our current Nuance-driven background speech workflow through eScription and will give physicians more documentation options," said Laureen O'Brien, chief information officer, Providence Health & Services, in a statement.
Dragon Medical allows clinician findings to be immediately part of patients' medical records and available to all care providers, improving overall patient care and coordination, the provider's experience and making healthcare more affordable, O'Brien said.
Providence Health & Services plans to integrate Dragon Medical with Epic HER for approximately 8,000 Providence clinicians. The integration will enable them to interact with, document and navigate through the EHR simply by using their voice, leading to faster EHR system adoption and improved physician satisfaction with EHR use.
Voice enabled HER simplifies healthcare documentation process. The process can be done by speaking in free-form or to trigger various clinical templates and medical record review, and sign-off can occur in real-time - eliminating the time lag and costs associated with medical transcription, according to company officials.
“Deploying voice recognition, at this point, is a standard best practice for electronic physician documentation and EHR adoption," said Janet Dillione, executive vice president and general manager, Nuance Healthcare, in a statement. "Our voice-driven clinical documentation solutions have been embraced by more than 450,000 clinicians across 10,000 healthcare facilities.”
“Providence's commitment to ensuring its entire physician base successfully adopts and utilizes the EHR is commendable and will result in high-value captured data that ultimately can be leveraged for better care delivery," Dillione added.
Nuance recently announced it is powering the PlaySay language learning app for the iPhone (News - Alert), iPad and iPod Touch. The app now integrates Nuance’s Dragon voice recognition and text-to-speech technologies helping users evaluate their pronunciation and provide feedback. The technology also enables conversations between people who are interested in a fun, social way to learn a new language.
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Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli