Posts Tagged ‘Nuance’
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1 Practice Fusion Connect 2010 in Review
Nov 10, 2010. Companies in Action.
EHR Scope and EHRtv thought we would see how things went in San Francisco with Practice Fusion’s first ever user conference: Connect 2010. The attendees ranged from Physicians, Practitioners and HIT professionals. In total there were roughly 200 persons in attendance. As stated at the Practice Fusion site; the main purpose of this event was to discuss, train and establish relationships with current users and those curious about the EHR.
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0 Nuance and Minnesota’s Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement (ICSI) Spearhead the First Statewide Effort to Help Ensure Patients Receive Appropriate High-Tech Diagnostic Imaging Tests
Nov 10, 2010. Press Releases.BURLINGTON, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) is today announcing that the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement (ICSI), a nonprofit organization whose members include 60 medical groups and six sponsoring health plans throughout Minnesota and surrounding states, has licensed Nuance’s RadPort, an electronic, evidence-based, decision-support (e-Ordering) solution to support a statewide initiative to help ensure Minnesotans only receive medically appropriate high-tech (MRI, CT, PET and nuclear cardiology) diagnostic imaging (HTDI) tests.
“At Fairview Health Services, we’re ecstatic over this option. It helps our physicians get patients the right test the first time without an administrative hassle. It flows seamlessly into the normal office procedure and consumes no extra time”
The ICSI initiative, which is the first of its kind in the country, is expected to save the Minnesota healthcare community more than $28 million annually. In addition, ICSI will use Nuance’s RadCube software solution to analyze physician-ordering trends in parallel with patients’ actual clinical outcomes.
“This is an exciting statewide initiative that will yield many patient, provider, health plan and community benefits, and potentially serve as a national model for how to help reduce the more than $100 billion spent annually on high-tech diagnostic imaging tests across the U.S,” said Cally Vinz, vice president of clinical products and strategic initiatives, ICSI. “With Nuance’s electronic decision-support and patient outcome analysis solution, we will work to guide appropriate ordering at the point-of-order to ensure the best exam is ordered for the patient every time. We will also have better insight into physician ordering habits and their impact on patient care.”
After a yearlong pilot program, in which more than 4,000 physicians from five Minnesota medical groups, five health plans (Allina Medical Clinic, Fairview Health Services, HealthPartners Medical Group, Park Nicollet Health Services, and St. Mary’s/Duluth Clinic Health System, BlueCross Blue Shield of Minnesota, HealthPartners, Medica, and UCare) and the Minnesota Department of Human Services used e-Ordering to order HTDI exams, it was found that the exams ordered with evidence-based decision-support technology had an increase in medical appropriateness versus orders initiated without it. The pilot also showed that using decision-support appropriateness criteria in the physician’s office reduced patient exposure to unnecessary radiation, and contributed to a 0 percent increase in HTDI scans ordered in 2007 (following an 8 percent increase in Minnesota in 2006). During the time of the pilot, an estimated $28 million in healthcare cost savings was reported.
Since the pilot, all five medical groups have continued to use the decision-support criteria. The groups report improved patient satisfaction and clinic efficiencies, as well as a reduction in administrative costs. In total, it is estimated that by using e-Ordering for the past three years, the five medical groups have helped save Minnesota $84 million, as there has not been an increase in the use of HTDI scans in Minnesota since 2007.
A Different Approach to Prior Notification
As part of this ICSI-led initiative, Nuance is helping Minnesota medical groups order HTDI exams in the way Minnesota insurers reimburse them, which will reduce administrative costs. Medical groups that use RadPort will likely be able to forego Radiology Benefit Management (RBM) prior notification procedures that require the time-consuming task of completing phone calls to RBM companies to gain assurance of insurer reimbursement for the exam. An RBM is an organization employed by healthcare insurers to manage utilization and costs associated with high-tech diagnostic exams.
With the RadPort process, ordering clinicians enter patient-specific information along with the requested exam into the e-Ordering system; based on the exam’s utility score (clinical appropriateness) the system will either verify the order or provide alternative procedures that better suit the patient’s indications. The physician can then select the recommended procedure, or override the system’s suggestion to move ahead with their originally requested exam.
“At Fairview Health Services, we’re ecstatic over this option. It helps our physicians get patients the right test the first time without an administrative hassle. It flows seamlessly into the normal office procedure and consumes no extra time,” said Barry Bershow, MD, vice president, quality, Fairview Health Services, Minneapolis, MN.
RadPort provides access to a common set of decision-support appropriateness criteria (via direct integration into an electronic health record (EHR) or via a standalone Web portal). RadPort’s appropriateness criteria contains more than 15,000 clinical guidelines that are continuously updated in accordance with patient demographics, imaging procedures, the American College of Radiology (ACR) Appropriateness Criteria®, as well as input from a clinical committee at Massachusetts General Hospital and other leading clinical partners across the country.
Provider Support and Patient Benefits
Electronic decision-support benefits providers, health plans and patients alike. In addition to avoiding the expenses and inefficiency of phone-in RBM prior notification, providers have immediate information about the usefulness of the high-tech imaging test they want to order. Furthermore, the immediate feedback from the RadPort system eliminates patient’s wait times for exam scheduling, reduces the risk of unnecessary radiation exposure, can enhance the patient-physician relationship through point-of-order shared decision making, and expedites high-tech imaging by increasing the likelihood that patients have the appropriate diagnostic study already done when they are referred onto a specialist.
“The ICSI solution is a win-win-win. Physicians aren’t hassled, the patient receives the right test and avoids unnecessary radiation, and the payer – whether health plan, employer, government or patient – incurs no unnecessary expense,” said Patrick Courneya, MD, medical director for care delivery systems, HealthPartners Health Plan.
Nuance’s RadCube software solution will be available for use by Minnesota medical groups and hospital-based clinics that adopt the decision-support e-Ordering option. RadCube is a Web-based intelligence tool for the collection, analysis and sharing of data that can be viewed via one interface for instantaneous analytics to drive appropriate order monitoring, forecasting, and provider productivity. ICSI will also have access to the de-identified data of all medical groups using RadCube, thereby improving the state’s knowledge of which diagnostic imaging tests get the best patient outcomes.
Nuance Working on National Level to Address Costly Inappropriate Imaging
“In alignment with President Obama’s healthcare reform goals, the initiative to reduce unnecessary exams, costs and administrative efforts that do not contribute to better patient care and improved patient outcome is an area ripe for change,” said Mike Mardini, vice president of medical imaging at Nuance. “The ICSI effort is a shining example of how we nationally should be applying healthcare IT to meaningfully impact patient care and cost of delivery. Electronic decision-support provides physicians with the information they need at the point-of-order to support the best care delivery plan possible for the patient. In addition to the $28 million dollars the ICSI initiative is expected to save annually, patients will miss less work, as well as spend less time and money on travel, day-care and co-pays associated with diagnostic imaging tests they do not need.”
As part of this nationwide effort, Nuance co-founded the Imaging e-Ordering Coalition with the Center for Diagnostic Imaging (CDI). This Coalition is compromised of members including Nuance, the Advanced Radiology Consultants, Alliance for Quality Imaging, American College of Radiology (ACR), CDI, Connecticut State Medical Society – IPA, GE Healthcare, Insight Imaging, MedCurrent, Medicalis Corporation, Merge Healthcare and Radnet. Currently, the Coalition is focused on educating the U.S. Congress on issues inline with the ICSI initiative. The Coalition is promoting Health Information Technology enabled decision-support (e-Ordering) as a solution to assure that all patients receive the most medically appropriate diagnostic imaging test for their specific condition at that time of care.
For more information on all of Nuance’s healthcare solutions please visit http://www.nuance.com/for-healthcare/index.htm.
Nuance’s Healthcare Business
Nuance’s healthcare portfolio of proven, speech-enabled clinical documentation and communication solutions enable healthcare provider organizations to improve financial performance, enhance patient care, and increase patient safety. With more than 10,000 healthcare provider organization customers and 450,000 clinician customers worldwide, Nuance has the experience and solutions that meet the individual needs of any size healthcare provider organization.
Nuance Communications, Inc.
Nuance 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.
Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement
Founded in 1993 by HealthPartners, Mayo Clinic and Park Nicollet Health Services, ICSI today is comprised of 60 medical group and hospital members representing 9,000 physicians in Minnesota and surrounding states, and is sponsored by six health plans in Minnesota and Wisconsin. An independent, nonprofit organization, ICSI’s mission is to champion health care quality and help its members implement best clinical practices for their patients. ICSI is also leading the transformation of the health care system into a more patient-centered and value-driven entity.
Nuance, RadPort, RadCube and the Nuance logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other company names or product names may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
The statements in this press release, relating to future plans or future events or services, are forward-looking statements which are subject to specific risks and uncertainties. These could involve particular market trends, competition factors and other risks described in the documents submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The actual results, events and services may vary significantly from the forecasts. The reader is warned not to rely on these forward-looking statements without reservation, since these are simply reflections of the current situation.
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0 Nuance and IBM Collaborate on Breakthrough Clinical Language Understanding Capabilities for Healthcare
Oct 8, 2010. Dragon Medical, Health Information Technology, News, Press Releases.Continue Reading...Agreement Focused on Advancing Natural Language Processing Technologies to Drive Evidence-Based Care and Improve Patient Outcomes
BURLINGTON, Mass. & ARMONK, N.Y.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that the companies are working to advance the state-of-the-art in Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) technologies that will enable healthcare organizations to understand and use the clinical information contained in the more than two billion patient reports dictated every year in the U.S. alone. As part of this agreement, teams of leading natural language processing (NLP) researchers at IBM and Nuance are collaborating to integrate the two companies’ technologies. By working together, Nuance and IBM will advance the use of NLP technologies as a core component of electronic health record (EHR) workflows.
“Protecting and encouraging clinician dictation is important to ongoing, high-quality patient care. Without the inclusion of such detailed physician notes, there is validated concern amongst caregivers that patients’ medical records will be reduced to cookie-cutter documents that do not differentiate from one patient to the next.”
With a goal to transform healthcare clinical documentation through advanced technologies, Nuance and IBM are developing systems that will automatically extract and convert discrete, clinical data from clinician dictated narrative into actionable information that can be used to bring a more evidence-based approach to patient care. Advanced CLU capabilities, a healthcare specific form of natural language processing technologies, will help healthcare organizations unlock valuable patient information from the billions of medical reports that are created in a free-form, unstructured format each year. Access to this information will drive better and more cost-effective patient care across the healthcare industry and will strengthen organizations’ efforts to comply with quality reporting and pay-for-performance requirements, such as those outlined in the HITECH Act’s Meaningful Use criteria.
“The broad digitization of health data and patients’ medical records will generate an enormous amount of clinical information, creating a tremendous opportunity for the healthcare industry to gain valuable insight into what has and has not worked successfully from a patient care and operational perspective,” said Dr. John E. Kelly III, IBM senior vice president and director of IBM Research. “With Nuance, we’ll work to ensure healthcare organizations can gain access to, and classify health data to improve patient outcomes and to help lower the cost of healthcare.”
With these advanced CLU technologies integrated into Nuance’s suite of speech recognition solutions, clinicians will be empowered to document via speech recognition into the EHR – the preferred method of documentation for many clinicians – knowing a CLU-enhanced system can process, identify and extract important clinical data elements such as problems, social history, medications, allergies, and procedures from the free-form, narrative text.
“Together, we share a commitment to transform the flow of information and the efficacy of EHRs within healthcare organizations. This unprecedented collaboration, between two leaders in health IT, will help facilitate information exchange and knowledge to deliver actionable data, bend the healthcare cost curve and help improve the care we all receive,” said Paul Ricci, chairman and CEO of Nuance. “By combining our Clinical Language Understanding solutions with the innovative work underway at IBM and Nuance, we will continue to bring unmatched, natural language technologies to the thousands of hospitals and physician practices that rely on Nuance clinical documentation solutions.”
“Nuance and IBM are taking on a critical project that will bring tremendous value to patient care. Clinical language understanding presents a real opportunity to bridge the gap between physicians’ documentation preferences and the need for structured, measurable clinical data,” said Reid F. Conant, MD, FACEP, emergency physician, chief medical informatics officer, Tri-City Emergency Medical Group. “Protecting and encouraging clinician dictation is important to ongoing, high-quality patient care. Without the inclusion of such detailed physician notes, there is validated concern amongst caregivers that patients’ medical records will be reduced to cookie-cutter documents that do not differentiate from one patient to the next.”
To learn more about Nuance’s CLU initiatives and solutions, and to see its full healthcare portfolio, please visit http://www.nuance.com/for-healthcare/resources/nlp.
Nuance’s Healthcare Business
Nuance’s healthcare portfolio of proven, speech-enabled clinical documentation and communication solutions enable healthcare provider organizations to improve financial performance, enhance patient care, and increase patient safety. With more than 10,000 healthcare provider organization customers and 450,000 clinicians worldwide, Nuance has the experience and solutions that meet the individual needs of any size healthcare provider organization.
Nuance Communications, Inc.
Nuance 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 and the Nuance logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other company names or product names may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
The statements in this press release, relating to future plans or future events or services, are forward-looking statements which are subject to specific risks and uncertainties. There are a number of factors which could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those indicated in such forward looking statements, including fluctuations in demand for the Nuance products, the relationship with IBM and the continued development of Nuance products. The reader is warned not to rely on these forward-looking statements without reservation, since these are simply reflections of the current situation. Nuance disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of developments occurring after the date of this document.
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1 Dragon Medical Accelerates Transition to EHR
Apr 22, 2009. Dragon Medical.CHICAGO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN), a leading supplier of speech solutions, today announced results from a new study that shows how Nuance’s Dragon Medical® software, the healthcare industry’s most widely used real-time speech recognition software, can significantly accelerate the transition to, and utilization of electronic health records (EHRs).
As EHRs have risen to the forefront of the healthcare information technology (HIT) agenda at the physician, provider organization, government and consumer levels, Dragon Medical software is increasingly recognized as an essential component to successful EHR rollout. According to a survey completed by 1,255 physicians who have adopted Nuance’s Dragon Medical software:
- 83 percent said that it improved the quality of their electronic patient notes;
- 81 percent said that it significantly reduced transcription spending; and,
- 69 percent said it made their EHR faster and easier to use.
Despite strong endorsements for EHRs, their adoption is lagging. Today, less than two percent of U.S. hospitals have fully switched to EHRs, according to a study from the New England Journal of Medicine that was released on March 25, 2009, and a third of the 3,000 hospitals surveyed cited reluctance among doctors to change work habits as a leading hurdle. To facilitate EHR migration further, Nuance is collaborating with leading EHR vendors, such as Allscripts, to launch the Dragon Medical EHR Certification Program. While Dragon Medical software already works “out-of-the-box” with more than 150 EHR systems, the Certification Program is designed to optimize clinician use of EHRs by introducing a new standard of speech recognition interoperability.
“Our physician clients have embraced Dragon Medical as the primary and best means of speech-enabling their electronic health records, because Dragon Medical helps them to quickly and easily create high-quality, real-time patient documentation,” said Glen Tullman, chief executive officer of Allscripts. “Speech is a key component of the electronic healthcare revolution, and Nuance’s certification program will ensure that physicians have a reliable list of electronic health records that will optimize their use of this vital clinical capability.”
As part of the Dragon Medical EHR Certification Program, EHR vendors complete a Nuance-managed evaluation during which they work with Nuance engineers to further optimize The Dragon Medical software’s interoperability with their EHR. By adding this additional layer of interoperability, physicians and healthcare organizations can confidently make their EHR migration, knowing speech recognition is not only possible, but has been pre-tested and optimized for utmost clinician efficiency.
Dragon Medical and the EHR, Accelerating the Transition
“The biggest challenge facing the roll-out of electronic medical records contemplated in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is achieving meaningful use without adding to physicians’ documentation burden. This can be accomplished by closely coordinating voice entry with structured notes, rather than treating voice and structured entry as an ‘either-or’ proposition,” said Wes Rishel, vice president and analyst in Gartner’s healthcare provider research practice.
As the Health and Human Services Department works to define “meaningful use” of an EHR, Nuance believes that Dragon Medical software can help physicians and organizations move toward complying with what will ultimately be considered “meaningful” EHR use, by ensuring that clinicians actually utilize the EHR and that the physician narrative is not lost during the documentation process. As proven by the more than 100,000 physicians already using Dragon Medical software to dictate the narrative component of their patient visits, speech-driven clinical documentation is available in real-time, notes are more complete and patient care is improved.
“Today, more than 20 percent of all physicians in North America use speech solutions from Nuance to generate over 800 million electronic medical records a year,” said Peter Durlach, senior vice president of marketing and product strategy, Nuance Healthcare. “Dragon Medical is increasingly recognized as an essential component to EHR rollout as healthcare provider organizations work to implement, and effectively utilize EHR systems to comply with the federal government’s five-year adoption goal, as well as earn their fair share of incentive payments from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”
Dragon Medical software is proven to make clinicians up to 25 percent more efficient with an EHR when compared to using a non voice-enabled system. And, as supported by a May 2007 report issued by KLAS, 76 percent of clinicians using “desktop” speech recognition – to directly control an EHR system – report faster medical report turn-around time, better service to patients, sharply reduced costs and increased productivity. Benefits for healthcare organizations that provide physicians with a speech-enabled EHR include:
- Reduced Transcription Costs – By enabling clinicians to dictate directly into the EHR system with real-time speech recognition, healthcare provider organizations can eliminate significant operating costs associated with traditional manual transcription.
- Faster Medical Report Creation - Using speech, physicians can create patient documents at the point of care, resulting in faster turn-around times and more accurate, thorough patient records.
- More Detailed Documentation - According to physicians, the narrative is the most important part of a patient note. A medical record that combines point-and-click EHR templates with dictated physician narrative promotes ongoing higher quality care.
- Increased Overall User Productivity and Satisfaction – By using speech recognition to navigate and dictate directly into the EHR system, clinicians can eliminate hours of typing, clicking and scrolling, allowing them to spend more time providing high quality patient care and increasing their satisfaction with the entire documentation process.
For more information on the Dragon Medical EHR Certification Program or Dragon Medical software visit http://www.nuance.com/CertifiedEHRs.
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