Key Performance Indicators deliver data about return on investment and the efficiency of medical documentation for evidence-based decision making in healthcare administration. Higher initial recognition accuracy and reduced deployment/integration effort positively affects total cost of ownership. (TCO)
Nuance Communications, Inc., a leading supplier of speech solutions, today announced the availability of SpeechMagic 7 Release 2. SpeechMagic is the healthcare SDK platform for building a hospital-wide electronic speech infrastructure (eSI) in Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific. This new version contains the main features that Nuance’s global Healthcare IT business partners asked for; it will help healthcare providers achieve faster and more cost-efficient medical documentation. In its set of new features and benefits, the speech recognition platform allows the gathering of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to better assess productivity gains and turnaround-times. KPIs can be used by the hospital management to evaluate their return on investment and optimise their reporting and information capture processes. SpeechMagic 7 Release 2 makes it easier to introduce an eSI – no matter whether at a departmental level within a hospital or throughout an entire healthcare region – serving the adoption of EHRs. The deployment effort has been minimised through one-click deployment without down time for the users; integration into clinical IT systems is straightforward. To further boost initial recognition accuracy, SpeechMagic 7 Release 2 comes with enlarged medical vocabularies and advanced learning algorithms.
“The customisable Key Performance Indicators (KPI) in SpeechMagic 7 Release 2 deliver statistical evidence for business decisions. Hospital Managers can use KPIs for the average length of dictations or the time from dictation to validation to decide the allocation of transcription resources – in fact they can explore any variable affecting the entire documentation workflow”, says Mert Oez, Product and Innovation Manager at Nuance Healthcare. “Whatever the goal, the Key Performance Indicators in SpeechMagic 7 Release 2 can deliver the numbers to evaluate performance as defined by the hospital management itself. Those KPIs represent true decision power in the hands of hospital managers to better serve patient care in a demanding economic context.”
Technical highlights of SpeechMagic 7 Release 2
1. The Speech Accuracy Trainer: Doctors using frontend interactive speech recognition can now  easily add and remove words themselves. This enables the users to build their own customised recognition vocabularies in addition to the centralised vocabularies for all users of a site. Together with the enlarged out-of-the-box vocabulary and advanced learning algorithms the performance and accuracy of the speech recognition engine is being raised significantly – depending on the language, to up to 18% relative initial performance gain. The Speech Accuracy Trainer also provides a robust, easy to integrate infrastructure to introduce further accuracy enhancements automatically with each SpeechMagic update.
2. Individual user statistics: A data centric management system gathers key performance indicators (KPI) to measure productivity and turnaround times for each user individually. This allows the analysis and adjustment of the workflow for individual users or the entire organisation; taking into consideration the speech recognition method (frontend, backend) or the editing preference (self-editing or deferred). This enables the healthcare institution to deploy an eSI that will help deliver better healthcare while optimising its total cost of ownership.
3. Roll-out: The one-click deployment concept now better supports integration of browser and/or plugin-based systems to facilitate large-scale roll-outs.
4. Installation and upgrade concepts now include export and import tools that help the smooth transition to the latest versions.
5. Support of latest dictation recording devices: Philips SpeechMike 3000 series, the wireless SpeechMike Air, the Grundig Digta SonicMic and the wireless SonicMic Classic CordEx are supported, giving a larger choice to the users.
6. Expanded support for third party software components includes Windows 7, UTF-8 character encoding for Oracle databases and Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition (SQL CE). Linux-based thin clients and Citrix ready certification complete SpeechMagic’s unique Citrix offering.
7. Deployment in virtualised environments has been tested and proven with the latest version of VMWare Workstation and VMware ESXi 4.0
Speech-based information capturing in health-IT systems has gained great momentum in recent years, driven by the digitisation of healthcare. Nuance Healthcare technologies are used across the healthcare systems of many European regions, like Galicia in Spain, the Northumbria NHS Trust in the UK, several provinces in Norway or the Friuli region in Italy. Many of these regions have proven multi-million cost savings through their electronic speech infrastructure. SpeechMagic 7 Release 2 is designed to be integrated with health-IT systems. Hospitals should check dates, availability and upgrade offerings with their health-IT provider.
Nuance Healthcare
Nuance Healthcare provides a comprehensive family of speech-driven clinical documentation and communication solutions that enable healthcare provider organisations to reduce operating costs, increase reimbursement, and enhance patient care and safety. The company’s solutions are used by more than 8,000 hospitals and 400,000 doctors worldwide.
Nuance Communications, Inc.
Nuance Communications, Inc. (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. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Richter, Vanessa (Nuance EMEA)
Nuance Communications, Inc.
Tel: +32 9 239 8031
vanessa.richter@nuance.com
Durand-Badel, Anne (Nuance Healthcare)
Nuance Communications Austria
Tel +43 1 60119 1048
anne.durand-badel@nuance.com
Scheuer, Armin (Agency)
so2say communications
Tel: +49 30 2191 3610
armin.scheuer@so2say.com
