Hoping to capitalize on physicians' growing interest in mobile electronic health record solutions, Nuance Communications last week announced the integration of its cloud-based medical voice recognition with both Epic's Haiku for the iPhone and Canto for the iPad. With voice-enabled clinical information captured from these iOS mobile applications, clinicians will be able to benefit from the same functionality as desktop EHRs, but with more efficiency while on-the-go using the power of their own voices.
The Haiku and Canto mobile applications provide authorized clinical users of Epic's EHR with secure access to clinic schedules, hospital patient lists, health summaries, test results and notes, as well as supporting dictation and in-basket access. Now, with voice-enabling clinical documentation and navigation, Nuance claims Epic users will experience increased productivity resulting in an improvement in the quality of patient care.
Ninety-one percent of physicians in an August 2012 survey by Vitera Healthcare Solutions said they were interested in mobile EHR solutions. While 72 percent of surveyed healthcare professionals indicated that they already use their mobile device for work purposes, only six percent said they used their devices to connect to their EHR or to e-prescribe.
Survey results also showed that key features desired by respondents in a mobile EHR solution included the ability to review (93 percent) and update (87 percent) a patient's chart and order prescriptions (86 percent). The ability to document a patient's encounter (82 percent) and out-of-office activities (67 percent) were other essential elements surveyed professionals were looking for in a mobile EHR solution.
Earlier this month, Nuance and health IT vendor Cerner announced an agreement to create a new class of mobile healthcare applications on phones and tablets by embedding Nuance's voice recognition into Cerner's portfolio of mobile EHR solutions.
For more information:
- here's the Nuance announcement