From the March 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine




It is clear based on surveys and experience in the busy clinical setting that to achieve a high level of EMR penetration a blend of solutions is necessary for capturing and entering data. Taking this approach will lead physicians from the current status of clinical documentation capture (traditional dictation) to transcription with background speech recognition then in turn to the increasing use of front-end technology combined with other innovations for data capture including the mouse and keyboard.


Proven technology is offering a bridge over the line of disruption by allowing physicians to document their clinical encounter without the frustration of solely interacting with a time consuming point-and-click interface. Regardless of the method provided, the key to success in any clinical setting is providing clinicians with choices. In a regular clinic setting the physician may elect to use the front-end tools to capture the patient history and impression but as the day progresses and the workload increases the option to move to a background speech solution is available at any time. With choice always available to the clinicians in different clinical settings, resistance disappears as physicians feel empowered to make their own choice that suits their individual circumstances and patient load.

In every scenario, figuring out the capture component of the equation is first and foremost. Moving forward, however, we will see many health care organizations leveraging the power of Clinical Language Understanding (CLU), a technology that can extract clinically relevant data points from a clinician’s narrative and auto populate an EMR system. CLU, which has been referenced as the driving force behind Medical Intelligence will allow physicians to fully document patient encounters and medical decision-making details in their own words via speech-recognized dictation, while simultaneously extracting key clinical data, including: patient complaints, physician-assessed diagnoses, medication and procedural treatments, and health-related habits.

Imagine the value of a system, combining speech recognition and CLU, that not only recognizes what a physician is saying, but understands the meaning so that critical and relevant information can be automatically extracted, encoded into standardized medical vocabularies and shared with caregivers across the ecosystem of clinical systems.

Dr. Nick van Terheyden is the chief medical information officer for Nuance Communications. He brings a distinctive blend of medical practitioner and business strategist, to the realm of healthcare technology. Dr. van Terheyden is a pioneering creator in the evolution of health care technology and has worked as a business leader in one of the first speech recognition Internet companies.

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