Nuance Communications today released its Dragon Medical 10 speech recognition software, designed to speed up healthcare documentation in the UK and Ireland. Recognizing dictations nearly twice as fast as the previous release and boasting an improvement in accuracy of more than 20 percent, Dragon Medical 10 is expected to positively affect the availability of medical documentation and reduce patient waiting times. A set of new, industry-driven features such as new medical vocabularies, hidden mode, extended mobile dictation support, as well as advanced voice shortcuts and templates, have been introduced to make Dragon® Medical 10 the most efficient and cost-effective solution for creating healthcare documents.

Dragon Medical 10 allows doctors to create medical documents and emails, search the Web and control their PC entirely by voice, saving time and boosting productivity compared with typing and mouse navigation alone. By enabling doctors to rapidly and completely document patient consultations using their voice, Dragon Medical not only reduces transcription costs and improves productivity, it also helps to cut patient waiting times in the NHS and among private care providers.

"The NHS Improvement Plan of 2004 called for the waiting time between a patient’s referral and the start of treatment to be no longer than 18 weeks. Dragon® Medical 10 can help reduce referral to treatment (RTT) times by allowing for instantaneous document creation. This eliminates idle times in the RTT process when, for example, a request is sent to a hospital immediately after a patient’s visit to their General Practitioner," explains Marcel Wassink, vice president of EMEA Healthcare at Nuance Communications.

Features and benefits of Dragon Medical 10

• Real-time speech recognition makes documentation faster and easier
Dragon Medical 10 enables doctors to dictate directly into their word processing or clinical reporting application and rapidly edit and sign reports, accelerating data input, reducing mouse clicks and the need for typing. Streamlined documentation processes result in significant cost savings and efficiency gains in healthcare administration.

• More detailed documentation contributes to better patient care
According to doctors, the narrative is the most important part of a patient note as it is the clear articulation of the unique story of every patient encounter. With real-time speech recognition, critical patient documentation is available immediately for other care providers to continue with the treatment.

• Less typing makes self-editing doctors up to 25 percent more efficient
Eliminating reliance on typing allows doctors to spend more time practicing medicine and up to 25 percent less time documenting care. With Dragon Medical 10’s new macro capability, clinicians can create customized voice shortcuts for common phrases or larger blocks of text that can include embedded fields. Abbreviated voice commands such as "patient history" speeds up documentation and associated desktop, Web search and navigation tasks.

• New macro capability in Dragon Medical 10 supports customized voice shortcuts for common phrases or larger blocks of text that can include embedded fields. Abbreviated voice commands such as "patient history" speed up documentation and associated desktop, Web search and navigation tasks.

• Robust and finely-tuned medical speech recognition vocabularies for greater accuracy
Dragon Medical 10 supports more than 75 medical disciplines, from family medicine and internal medicine to orthopedics and cardiology with proprietary medical speech recognition vocabularies. With these specialized vocabularies, Dragon Medical has proven to be up to 38 percent more accurate than non-medical speech recognition software in healthcare use cases.

• Rapid deployment with no need for custom IT integration
As a result of Dragon Medical’s ability to enable direct dictation into all health IT systems, the software can be rapidly deployed with no customized IT integration or interface development efforts. With the proper provider training and associated deployment services, clinicians can be up and running within a matter of days.

• Secure patient information
Dragon Medical uses a unique file encryption technique to help protect patient security and confidentiality, thereby assisting healthcare facilities in complying with the Data Protection Act and BS7799.

Dragon Medical is one of many products in Nuance’s extended portfolio of speech-enabled clinical documentation and communication solutions. The portfolio also includes the SpeechMagic technology of recently acquired Philips Speech Recognition Systems (PSRS). With the two flagship products Dragon Medical and SpeechMagic, Nuance is able to address the full spectrum of clinical documentation requirements in the healthcare sector. For more information about all of Nuance’s Healthcare solutions in the UK and Ireland, please visit: www.nuance.co.uk/healthcare/dragonmedical

Availability
Dragon Medical 10 is available in the UK and in Ireland through Nuance’s network of certified reseller partners and professional sales organizations; further information is available at http://nuance.co.uk/sales/. Healthcare users of other Dragon solutions (Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Standard, Preferred and Professional) are advised to upgrade to Dragon Medical, as it is best suited for use in a clinical setting due to its superior accuracy and other powerful medical version-only capabilities. For additional information on features, upgrades, rebate offers and volume licensing programs, please visit www.nuance.co.uk/healthcare/dragonmedical or request more information at info.dragonmedical@nuance.com

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Nuance Communications, Inc.
Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN) is a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance’s proven applications and professional services. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.

Nuance, the Nuance logo, Dragon Medical SpeechMagic, powered by SpeechMagic and The experience speaks for itself are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.

Contact information:

EMEA
Vanessa Richter (corporate)
Nuance Communications, Inc.
+32 9 239 80 31
vanessa.richter@nuance.com

UK
Armin Scheuer (agency)
so2say communications
+49 30 2191 3610
armin.scheuer@so2say.com