Friday, January 8, 2010

Cool Technology of the Week

In previous posts, I've described the importance of dictation and voice recognition technologies in clinician workflow. Getting data into EHRs is the most challenging part of rollout. Clinicians at BIDMC have widely embraced server side and desktop voice recognition. But what about mobile devices?

Nuance has introduced a free iPhone version of Dragon, that's available at the App Store. This application enables a clinician to dictate a note and send it via SMS, email, or paste it into any application on the iPhone. A voice driven correction interface suggests appropriate words while editing.

The application optionally upload names from your addressbook, with your permission, purely to enhance speech recognition accuracy. No contact information is uploaded. You can delete any uploaded names. The iTunes reviews are uniformly positive, but there were some privacy concerns. Application changes to turn off uploads and delete previous uploads address these concerns.

A free mobile version of Dragon for the iPhone - that's cool!

4 comments:

  1. Sounds great, but triggers a question about security, and PHI. Is this handled via Symantec End Point?

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  2. This app works surprisingly well. The security aspect of the remote server-based voice recognition may be a hindrance in dictating patient-specific data but for general dictation it is quite useful.

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  3. This app demonstrates a nice application of Iphone technology towards healthcare systems.

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  4. John this is an excellent app. I have shared it with all the physicians in my division. I have used it daily since downloading it. I have avoided any protected health information. I used it to dictate this comment!

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