Speech recognition (speech rec) is an extremely powerful healthcare tool as it enables clinical documentation, voice navigation and automatic clinical fact extraction: while permitting medical professionals to perform their vital work rather than keying and writing.
There are therefore a myriad of potential healthcare apps that can be built from speech rec. Yet writing such programs requires the cumbersome purchase and installation of inflexible software licenses.
Nuance has found the solution by placing its specialized medical speech recognition capabilities and latest advancements in Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) technology on the cloud through the new Nuance Healthcare Development Platform. With this deployment, third-party developers can rapidly incorporate Nuance Healthcare technologies as part of a wide variety of healthcare applications. The Nuance Healthcare Development Platform protects users through HIPAA-supportive security and encryption features.
Announced at the HIMSS show, the initial version of the Nuance Healthcare Development Platform will be available by the end the first quarter 2011 and will support the Dragon speech engine for U.S. English. SpeechMagic and international language support will be added in releases scheduled for in the fourth quarter 2011.
The Nuance Healthcare Development Platform empowers developers to build a wide array of clinical solutions including ones that:Bring cloud-based speech recognition to smartphones, tablets, PCs and browser-based Applications. These enable physicians, nurses and other caregivers to dictate patient notes in real-time into clinical applications, such as electronic health records (EHR), running on an array of devices including the Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch
Convert narrative clinical documentation to structured data within EHRs: The Nuance CLU will automatically extract key, structured clinical data from clinicians’ dictated notes: patient complaints and allergies, physician-assessed diagnoses, medication and procedural treatments, and health-related habits
Automate information retrieval at the point-of-care: While at patients’ bedsides, in their offices or homes, clinicians can simply dictate a search query to access desired information. Whether they are looking for updated patient test results or clinical information from EHRs, clinical data repository or other source of medical content, it can be easily accessed via a mobile device
Collect patient information: The Nuance solution’s advanced speech capabilities on PCs, patient kiosks and mobile devices permit patients to speak their key medical information: including history of present illness, current medications and allergiesThe Nuance Healthcare Development Platform includes rapid application integration, in which developers can integrate the core SpeechAnywhere functionality in a matter of minutes, thereby reducing time to market. It also includes multimodal applications by which clinicians can freely mix voice, touch and typing to control and document within their applications, creating a seamless user experience. There are specialized medical speech and language models embedded with Nuance’s medical speech technology, through which users can achieve high accuracy levels; there is automatic data formatting, minimizing the need for corrections.
Nuance Healthcare Development Platform is easily configurable to most IT environments. It supports multiple devices and operating platforms. It enables SpeechAnywhere capabilities for applications operating within browsers running on Windows and Mac OSX environments, .NET applications running on Windows desktops and for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Future versions will support an expanded list of computing platforms, mobile devices and operating systems.
“Dictation has proven to be among the most preferred, intuitive and effective ways to document clinical information,” said Janet Dillione, executive vice president and general manager, Nuance Healthcare. “By expanding access to Nuance’s speech recognition and CLU capabilities, the Nuance Healthcare Development Platform is enabling application developers to unleash an entire new ecosystem of healthcare applications that will help clinicians and patients create and use high-quality clinical documentation better and smarter than ever before.”
Brendan B. Read is HealthTechZone’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by
Tammy Wolf
