Nuance Communications, Inc., announced today that Infirmary Health has achieved rapid success deploying Nuance clinical speech recognition technology embedded within Epic’s apps, which simplifies how physicians enter clinical information on mobile devices. Infirmary Health provides care for more than 100,000 patients annually across multiple hospitals and clinics in Alabama and has found Nuance’s voice-enabled clinical documentation speeds physician workflows on smartphones and tablets, expands productivity beyond the desktop, and expedites the creation of patient information directly within EHRs – critical components of delivering quality patient care.
Looking to support physicians and drive quality patient care, Infirmary Health provided Epic’s Haiku and Canto apps, which use Nuance’s clinical speech recognition, to a pilot group of clinicians at its largest hospital, Mobile Infirmary. Most physicians are accustomed to dictating patient notes, so choosing an intuitive mobile solution that leverages Nuance’s cloud-based platform provided a familiar user experience that required no voice training and minimal clinician education, helping to drive adoption.
“The response from our physicians was overwhelmingly positive, and we found demand from other physicians to be high — just in the first week following the rollout,” recounts Eddy Stephens, vice president and chief information officer at Infirmary Health. “Had we known this solution would be so successful, we would have provided it to all of the physicians up front,” says Stephens.
Supporting Mobile Clinicians
According to a recent study, more than 60 percent of physicians say they would like EHR access on their mobile devices in order to retrieve and document important patient information. As the largest non-government healthcare team in Alabama, Infirmary Health frequently has patients receiving treatment at different locations with as many as five or six physicians following a patient’s care, which can make treatment coordination challenging as both patients and clinicians rotate through facilities. Outfitted with these apps, physicians and clinical teams now have the most up-to-date information they need to make better informed treatment plans and enhance patient safety.
“Leveraging Nuance’s secure and HIPAA-compliant, cloud-based clinical speech recognition from a mobile device has allowed our physicians to immediately dictate their notes into the patient’s chart, making this important information immediately available to others,” explains Stephens. “This workflow has been essential for us. Now when the next physician arrives to see the patient, even a few minutes later, the first physician’s notes are already available in the chart for review.”
Usability Drives Productivity
Creating a consistent user experience for physicians – regardless of whether it is on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone – makes technology easier to use and improves quality patient care, efficiency, and adoption. By integrating with Infirmary Health’s current EHR, Nuance delivers enhanced physician productivity within existing workflows, and enables clinicians to access content, custom vocabularies, and templates between their various devices— creating a uniform mobile documentation experience that parallels their desktop workflow.
BYOD
Infirmary Medical joins the growing ranks of health providers empowering their clinical teams with mobile EHR access. As more organizations adopt “bring your own device” (BYOD) policies, the need for streamlined and enhanced workflows on mobile devices are critical.
“The rapid adoption of this technology is no surprise,” says Jonathon Dreyer, director of cloud and mobile speech solutions marketing at Nuance Communications. “Usability and user experience are taking a more prominent role in HIT development, and solutions designed with the end-user in mind will be more intuitive and streamlined, and as a result, more widely adopted.”
For more information about Nuance’s suite of cloud-based, speech-recognition solutions, watch the on-demand webinar, “Optimizing the Epic Experience with Dragon Medical – a CIO’s Perspective.”
