North Kansas City, Mo.-based health IT vendor Cerner and Burlington, Mass.-based Nuance Communications have joined forces to create a new class of mobile healthcare solutions on phones and tablets that will enable clinicians, simply by using their voice, to capture more complete patient notes, navigate applications and search for information while on-the-go. The two companies announced the new worldwide agreement in joint announcement last week.
As part of the agreement, Cerner will embed Nuance's cloud-based medical voice recognition into its full portfolio of mobile electronic health record solutions.
"By incorporating Nuance's voice recognition capabilities into our core clinical applications, we are able to provide the healthcare industry with a simple, fast method of capturing complex medical information within the patient record at the point-of-care," Don Bisbee, senior vice president of DeviceWorks at Cerner, said in the announcement.
One of those applications, PowerChart Touch, is a mobile, cloud-based solution that is part of the Millennium+ portfolio, offering role and venue-based mobile workflows which allow physicians to perform their job duties from a mobile device. The solution, which leverages Nuance's 360|SpeechAnywhere medical voice recognition technology, is touted as providing a true native application experience across an array of platforms.
In addition, Cerner and Nuance announced the availability and integration of Nuance's radiology reporting suite, PowerScribe 360, with Cerner's RadNet Radiology Information System (RIS), which allows radiologists to dictate, in real-time, reports that are integrated directly and instantly with the patient record.
The past few weeks have been busy for Nuance, according to a Boston Globe article, as the company has orchestrated two recent acquisitions of medical technology companies. On Oct. 1, Nuance purchased J.A. Thomas and Associates, an Atlanta clinical documents company with 80 employees, for $265 million. A few days earlier, Nuance agreed to buy Quantim, a health information business with 180 employees, from QuadraMed of Reston, Va., for an undisclosed amount.
Janet Dillione, executive vice president and general manager of Nuance's healthcare division, told the Globe that the acquisitions of Quantim and J.A. Thomas give Nuance "healthcare management software and knowledge of clinical documents that allows it to offer a more complete solution to healthcare providers." She added that, by automating such processes on a large scale, significant savings could be reaped.
To learn more:
- here's the announcement
- read the Globe article