Voice Recognition to Support Enterprise-wide Electronic Health Record Adoption
Nuance Communications, Inc. has announced that Providence Health & Services, ranked by Thomson Reuters among the top 20 percent of best-performing health systems in the country, is deploying Dragon Medical 360 | Network Edition across its healthcare enterprise, making medical voice recognition available at 27 hospitals and 250 clinics. The organization-wide deployment of Dragon Medical will support Providence’s rollout of the Epic electronic health record (EHR) system by empowering clinical staff to document and navigate the EHR by speaking.
Over the next year, Dragon Medical will be seamlessly integrated with Epic for approximately 8,000 Providence clinicians. Once fully deployed, clinicians will be able to interact with, document and navigate through the EHR simply by using their voice – a workflow that is proven to be more efficient and natural than typing alone, leading to 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,” said 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.”
As part of the Dragon Medical deployment, Providence will provide its clinical staff with physician-led training and standard, voice-enabled documentation templates to enable faster adoption and assimilation with current established workflows. The combined delivery of peer training and uniform documentation tools will empower physicians to embrace and navigate the EHR with voice, leading to improved adoption and workflow efficiencies. With a voice-enabled EHR, documentation 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.
“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,” said 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.”