SAN DIEGO -- Nuance Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq: NUAN), a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions, today announced that Kaiser Permanente Fresno Medical Center has selected Dragon NaturallySpeaking(R) Medical 8, the world's leading speech recognition solution for medical professionals, to enhance patient care. Dragon NaturallySpeaking enables the automatic conversion of speech into text at up to 160 words per minute, and allows the voice-control of software applications simply by speaking.
Kaiser Permanente Fresno Medical Center recently selected Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical 8 to enhance how patient care notes, reports, letters and other documents are generated in real-time, all by voice. Additional features allow providers to dictate on-the-go using a variety of input methods - PCs, tablets, digital voice recorders - and transcription is virtually instantaneous. Fresno Medical Center has worked with Exaq Micro Services to create an extensive Macro library of standard report templates with Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical so that physicians can quickly and easily produce electronic medical records simply by speaking a few key words. Using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Kaiser Permanente Fresno Medical Center aims to enhance patient care and allow physicians to spend less time charting and more time with patients.
"This technology saves me time in documenting patient encounters," said Robert Lonjers, MD, an internal medicine physician at Kaiser Permanente Fresno Medical Center who uses the software. "The content of the documentation is somewhat more detailed, and there are ergonomic benefits as well."
Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical 8 has built-in understanding for more than 300,000 words, and includes 14 pre-made healthcare vocabularies, including Emergency Medicine, General Medicine, Pathology, Radiology, Cardiology and Surgery disciplines. Healthcare organizations such as Kaiser Permanente Fresno Medical Center can also easily add their own words to the solution to create fully customized vocabularies. In addition, Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical 8 provides seamless speech input capabilities with Kaiser's existing electronic medical records (EMR) application Epic's HealthConnect system. Care providers can take advantage of voice-activated shortcuts, allowing a single word or phrase to automatically populate fields within a document.
"Increasingly the healthcare industry is turning to speech recognition to enhance patient care" said John Shagoury, president, Productivity Applications Division, Nuance. "Using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, organizations such as Kaiser Permanente Fresno Medical Center can not only transform how physicians work with their EMR applications, but can also free up healthcare professionals to spend more time with patients."
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