HIMSS 2012 is this week and hundreds of healthcare IT professionals have poured into Las Vegas for the event. Wednesday came as an especially important day however, as Nuance (News - Alert) Communications announced the winner of the 2012 Mobile Clinician Voice Challenge. A month long event encouraging healthcare developers to use mobile or web-based healthcare applications.

"Through access to Nuance's secure, cloud-based, medical speech recognition platform developers were challenged to give mobile clinicians a voice," said Janet Dillione, executive vice president and general manager, Nuance Healthcare. "Developers stepped up to the challenge and delivered some truly innovative clinical applications including disease management tools, diagnosis checklist systems, physician-patient interaction and communication tools, and practice management apps that will help mobile clinicians research, access, create and share clinical information faster than ever before."

Physician adoption of mobile healthcare devices is expected to reach up to 85 percent over the current year. Increasing the need for user-friendly healthcare applications that enhance medical professionals ability to track mobile workflow and overall provide effective patient care digitally.

The judges made their decision based on pre-defined criteria, including innovation, functional implementation, workflow, visual appeal and patient care benefits. The grand prizewinner was SparrowEDIS, developed by Montrue Technologies. SparrowEDIS is an emergency department information system for the iPad that allows doctors and nurses to dictate clinical narrative at the point-of-care. Also, with its voice recognition capability clinicians can check for prescription statuses, create orders, and share discharge instructions at a patient’s bedside all through the application.

Other promising technologies presented include eHealth Made Easy’s Imagine MD, and a brand new image sharing storage solution created by Siemens and Dell. Imagine MD is a cloud-based software-as-a-service solution that combines full-scale electronic health records, practice management, and revenue management systems that and affordable for small practices to use in their day-to-day operations. The new image sharing storage that Dell (News - Alert) and Siemens are combining to develop a cloud storage space that will provide a massive amount of storage for its users.

As the week winds down, mobile applications and cloud computing will surely continue to rule the conversations and topics. Businesses in every sector are turning to cloud computing it is only natural that the healthcare industry would follow suite. It is an industry that deals with a lot of information storage, and needs an alternative to the costly storage systems currently in place at most hospitals. Mobile and device applications are also a promising development in the field because it offers physicians the opportunity to communicate quickly and clearly with their patients, hopefully, streamlining healthcare operations and making the industry more efficient as a whole.