It's widely believed that in the long run, physicians will need to data mine, run reports and submit numbers to insurance companies, and will be graded on these scores.

New and Exciting


At the beginning of 2010, eMeds announced its Solution Series Chart product had completed the 2010 Integrating Healthcare Enterprise Connectathon.

"We place great value on industry efforts like the Connectathon and the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase that demonstrate our ability to share information with other health care platforms," Stearns says. "Interoperability is at the core of advances in healthcare related to health information technology and we are now entering an era where information will be readily available to providers. We are very focused on making sure that this information is accurate and protected."

Nuance, the world's largest speech recognition software company made over $1 billion last year, with about 40 percent of that resulting from the health care business. The company has recently developed the Dragon Medical EHR Certification Program to facilitate collaboration between Nuance and EHR vendors in order to optimize the EHR experience of end-users.

"Our business is all about helping out physicians create medical records using speech recognition to make the overall documentation experience in EHRs faster," says Belton. "Let's say a doctor is sitting in front of a computer looking at Word or an EHR and rather than typing 'saw a 35-year-old male complaining of ACL tear from playing soccer,' they can pick up the phone and dictate the words, and it comes across real time on the computer in front of them."

Today, about 150,000 physicians use some flavor of speech recognition, which is close to 25 percent of all physicians in the country.

"The benefits of this real time speech are manifold," Belton says. "It improves quality of care, improves finances, allows savings on transcription costs and has been proven to increase reimbursement dramatically."

Dr. Steven Zuckerman, a physician in Baton Rouge, La., has been utilizing this technology and has seen great returns.

"It takes the physician from having to be a data entry clerk to doing something that we are very comfortably doing and that is trained dictating," he says. "In order to find relevant information, you don't have to hunt and peck and go down checklists and check things off. You do it in a very natural way; you talk into the computer and it converts to text, it could not be easier. Even more important, it saves you about $15,000 a year in terms of transcription costs."

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