Providence Health & Services, a not-for-profit Catholic healthcare ministry with 32 hospitals, 350 physician clinics, has announced it is deploying a voice-activated application from Burlington, Mass.-based Nuance Communications that will support the system’s Epic EHR system to nearly every one of its hospitals and clinics. The implementation, occurring over the next year, will integrate Nuance’s Dragon Medical with Epic’s EHR for approximately 8,000 Providence clinicians. Once deployed, clinicians will be navigate through the EHR with the use of their voice.
"Dragon Medical builds upon our current Nuance-driven background speech workflow through eScription and will give physicians more documentation options," Laureen O'Brien, CIO at Providence Health & Services, said in a statement. "We are very excited to make this tool available to all of our providers in order to enable them to be more efficient. Using Dragon Medical allows clinician findings to be immediately part of patients' medical records and available to all care providers, improving overall patient care and coordination, the provider's experience and making healthcare more affordable."
Providence will provide physician-led training and standard, voice-enabled documentation templates to try to enable faster assimilation with current established workflows. In a voice-enabled EHR, documentation can be done by speaking in free-form or to trigger various clinical templates and medical record review, and sign-off can occur in real-time.
