24 January 2011 – New Delhi, India – Nuance Communications has introduced Dragon® Medical 11, the latest version of its medical desktop, real-time speech recognition software. Developed to enable doctors to conveniently and efficiently generate clinical letters and navigate clinical systems, Dragon Medical maximises healthcare professionals’ productivity and performance, enabling them to do more with less to save time, reduce costs, improve information accuracy and raise the quality of service and care delivered to patients.

Dragon Medical 11 is equipped with new commands that act on multiple mouse clicks and keystrokes. With the new commands, it is faster and easier to open applications, open or switch to a particular window, send emails, or search the web – all by voice. Dragon Medical 11 comes with increased audio resolution and an updated speech engine which is more accurate with improved ability to learn from correction of misrecognitions to deliver continuous accuracy improvements over time.

Commenting on the launch of Dragon Medical 11, Sunny Rao, Managing Director, India and South East Asia, Nuance Communications, said: “Dragon Medical can play a key role in increasing the quality of patient care, and safety, through improved clinical letter turnaround time and document consistency. It also has a proven track record in reducing costs. We feel this is extremely important for a vast country like India, where it is imperative to shift towards a more organized healthcare eco-system. For many healthcare organisations, Dragon Medical will become a key component in increasing efficiency and will assist in addressing the challenges faced by medical professionals to deliver tangible improvements in both patient care and the bottom line.”

Dragon Medical 11 enables clinical letters to be dictated directly up to three times faster than typing, helping to get discharge letters to patients within 24 hours. With accurate reporting central to delivering optimised patient care, Dragon Medical’s accuracy rates of up to 99% ensure clear, accurate, and timely clinical letters.

To ensure consistent accuracy, Dragon Medical has been optimised for non native speakers too, while new medical vocabularies cover almost 80 specialities and sub-specialities. Dragon Medical has been tuned to recognise and support Indian English accents, thus providing a hassle-free and seamless experience for Indian doctors using the software. Patient report confidentiality and compliance is assured through the robust encryption of audio and text files.

“Dragon Medical is a fantastic tool to automate the medical reporting, be it radiology, cardiology reports or the Patient Discharge summary. In fact a few of our consultants who were earlier dictating the reports to the Medical transcriptionist or were writing the reports themselves are very happy to use Dragon Medical as it has cut down the turnaround time drastically,” reports Balihar Singh Virk, Manager - Information Systems, Satguru Partap Singh Apollo Hospitals, Ludhiana.

Helping to speed up the clinical letter creation process are convenient new features including Electronic Health Record (EHR)support, which makes it easy to navigate and dictate within existing clinical and diagnostic support applications and ‘Hidden Mode’, which enables users to click anywhere within a clinical application while dictating, and then to add text where necessary afterwards. The inclusion of Dragon Templates also saves time by automating form-filling applications by adding voice enabled fields in dictation templates. Also, the fully featured, customisable PowerMic hand-held microphone, allows buttons to be programmed to run any Dragon Medical function or user voice command.

Dr.Sanjay Jain, Head of Radiology – Prince Aly Khan Hospital, Byculla, Mumbai user of Dragon remembers "Writing down radiology reports has been a pain-staking exercise with its inception right from residency days. All other speciality residents have also been part of this jamboree with hours drained down on penning incorrigible notes and discharge cards. Then the species of Medical transcriptionists evolved, overhyped due to overseas work paddled further into realms of hospital corridors and desktops, but demanded great deal of accuracy and speed-totally operator-dependent! Creativity demanded something more and gave birth to the Dragon Software - you think and speak and there you are - on your desktop. Dragon has helped me streamline Radiology Reporting with a very high degree of accuracy consistently independently. All Specialities in Medicine can benefit enormously by using Dragon-The Concorde in Medicine”.

Nuance Healthcare

Dragon Medical is one of many products in Nuance’s portfolio of speech-enabled documentation and communication solutions. As Nuance Healthcare solutions address specific requirements, healthcare organisations can select the most appropriate Nuance products from the product ‘mix’, according to their needs. This gives them the flexibility to ensure that they’re only investing in the solutions that meet their needs.

Dragon Medical has been developed to enable clinicians to dictate and instantly review their dictated reports. When approved by them, the clinician can then share the report with their peers or colleagues in real time, thereby ensuring that discharge letters can be dispatched to patients within 24 hours.

Nuance Communications, Inc.

Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN) is a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance's proven applications and professional services. For more information, please visit www.nuance.co.uk.