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July 27, 2012

Providence Health to Roll Out Speech Recognition Tech Systemwide

By Anamika Singh
TMCnet Contributor

Providence Health & Services, with 64,000 people in five states, Alaska, California, Montana, Oregon and Washington, will deploy speech recognition technology across the healthcare system to 8,000 clinicians in 27 hospitals and 250 clinics.

Providence Health selected Burlington, Mass.-based Nuance (News - Alert) Communications for its Dragon Medical 360 | Network Edition. The deployment will support Providence's Epic electronic health record system for the clinical staff to document and navigate the EHR by speaking.

Designed exclusively for hospitals and large practices using Citrix-based EHRs, Dragon Medical 360 Network Edition improves the physician dictation experience and allows IT departments to manage large-scale Dragon Medical 360 | Network Edition user populations.

An electronic health record is a collection of patient health information generated by one or more meetings in any care delivery setting. An EHR typically includes patient demographics, progress notes, problems, medications, vital signs, past medical history, immunizations, laboratory data and radiology reports. It’s said to streamline clinicians’ workflow, and it has the ability to generate a complete record of a clinical patient encounter.

 Also, Dragon Medical will be integrated with Epic soon. This will help clinicians to interact, document and navigate through the EHR by using their voice, a workflow that would be more efficient and natural than typing alone. This results in faster EHR system adoption and improved physician satisfaction with EHR use.

"Dragon Medical builds upon our current Nuance-driven background speech workflow through eScription and will give physicians more documentation options," stated Laureen O'Brien, chief information officer, Providence Health & Services.

"We are very excited to make this tool available to all of our providers in order to enable them to be more efficient. Using 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 added.

Providence will provide its clinical staff with physician-led training and standard, voice-enabled documentation templates to enable faster adoption and assimilation with established workflows.

"We are pleased to be Providence's strategic partner for their Epic EHR implementation. Deploying voice recognition, at this point, is a standard best practice for electronic physician documentation and EHR adoption," comments Janet Dillione, executive vice president and general manager, Nuance Healthcare.

"Our voice-driven clinical documentation solutions have been embraced by more than 450,000 clinicians across 10,000 healthcare facilities. Time and again, our solutions have been proven to create efficiencies in capturing the patient story and the required structured data. 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 says.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO click here.

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Edited by Brooke Neuman