Nuance Intros Variety of Mobile Dragon Solutions for Health Care

Nuance is introducing a suite of Dragon Medical Mobile solutions for the health care industry March 1. Building on solutions Nuance currently offers for Apple's iPhone, the solutions are slated to arrive "in the spring."
 
Nuance's Dragon Medical Mobile Dictation application, based on its speech-recognition technology, will enable health care workers to dictate patient notes, e-mails and text messages onto their smartphones.
 
A Dragon Medical Mobile Search application can search through medical information, following voice instructions; a mobile Dragon Medical Mobile Recorder can capture dictation, forward the file on to transcription services, and send it back to the clinician for review; and the Dragon Medical Mobile SDK (software development kit), offered to third-party companies, will allow developers to extend Dragon Medical Mobile capabilities to new applications.
 
Separately, the company also introduced a clinical documentation solution based on its NLP (Natural Language Processing) technology. Using technology acquired from the company Language and Computing, the solution is said to bring structure to growing heaps of clinical documentation, often described, according Nuance, as the "narrative blob."
 
"Natural Language Processing adds meaning to the clinical narrative, so that clinicians' spoken words are not simply transformed into text, but can be used to create meaningful clinical data that can be inserted into an EHR or other data repositories without forcing doctors to document via time-consuming and restrictive point-and-click templates," John Shagoury, Nuance executive vice president for healthcare, said in a statement.  
 
The health care industry is increasingly turning to mobile solutions, and firm Manhattan Research expects that 81 percent of physicians in the United States will be using smartphones by 2011. A February survey by medical app provider Epocrates additionally found a number of clinicians to be interested in the Apple iPad.
 
"Nuance is helping bring the power of mobile speech to the healthcare community, and make clinical documentation and information access more efficient for the clinician," Peter Durlach, Nuance senior vice president of marketing, said in a statement. "Whether quickly documenting a patient encounter while rounding, searching the Internet for medical information, or sending a quick spoken text message about a patient's condition to a colleague, [Nuance's solutions] will simplify the process."
 
On Feb. 26, competitor 3M Health Information Systems introduced a new medical dictation solution, extending its offering from BlackBerry and Windows Mobile platforms to the iPhone platform as well.