Concord Hospital Expands Rollout of Nuance Dragon Medical One to all Physicians and Ambulatory Nurses After Realizing Time Savings

Nuance’s speech recognition platform improves clinical documentation quality, efficiency and job satisfaction at hospital


KANSAS CITY, Mo., Oct. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- At the Cerner Health Conference (CHC) Nuance Communications, Inc. (booth #501) today announced that Concord Hospital, an affiliate of Capital Region Health Care, is broadening its use of Dragon Medical One, Nuance’s AI-powered speech recognition platform and PowerMic Mobile, a secure microphone app that turns any workstation at the hospital, clinic or home into a dictation station. The expanded rollout to all physicians and ambulatory nurses comes after Concord Hospital realized improvements in clinical documentation accuracy and efficiency and quantifiable time savings driven by the initial implementation of Nuance’s solutions.

“We evaluated speech recognition solutions from multiple vendors and ultimately chose Nuance for its deep integration with Cerner, proven track record of delivering measurable outcomes, and flexible licensing model that enables us to deploy their technology to all our staff,” said Garvin Eastman, application analyst, Concord Hospital. “With Nuance Dragon Medical One and PowerMic Mobile we experienced dramatic improvements in our staff’s ability to more quickly and accurately capture a patient’s complete story at the point of care. This initial success prompted us to expand the rollout of Dragon Medical One to all of our primary care and specialty practice nurses as well as other clinical leaders. We have also started testing the use of Dragon Medical One by practice management staff, using it beyond clinical documentation, including email, evaluations, and various other applications. The feedback we’ve received so far is confirming similar benefits to those reported by our physicians and nurses.”

When Concord Hospital first implemented Dragon Medical One and PowerMic Mobile its aim was to drive an increase in physician adoption rates and improvements in clinical documentation accuracy and efficiency. After using the solutions, and more specifically built-in productivity tools, like personalized voice commands and AutoTexts, physicians are able to save an additional 328 hours per month—further helping reduce physician burnout by increasing automation to optimize workflows.

After seeing the time savings and improvements in clinical documentation Dragon Medical One provided its physicians, Concord Hospital’s Chief Medical Information Officer envisioned how the solution could also empower its nurses who had become bogged down by the amount of documentation they were typing every day.

“Instead of hiring nurses for their clinical expertise, we needed to hire them for their typing speed because they were either on the phone doing triage or spending all day typing up notes and it just seemed a crazy use of a valuable resource,” said Dr. Paul Clark, Chief Medical Information Officer at Concord Hospital. “Nurses who may not have great typing skills but are great clinicians are handicapped because they’re spending all their time trying to document as best they can. So, it was obvious to me, speech recognition would be helpful for nurses in addition to our physicians.”

As a result, Concord Hospital rolled out Dragon Medical One to nurses. Just as the physicians were pleased with the benefits of speech-enabled workflows, nurses too found the time savings and documentation accuracy empowering. They received positive feedback about the quality of the notes while spending less time documenting and more time caring for patients.

The benefits nurses experienced with Dragon Medical One and PowerMic Mobile were quantified in an assessment conducted by Concord Hospital which found a:

  • 65 percent reduction in time spent completing the nursing triage notesfrom 17.1 minutes down to 6.1 minutes per note on average;
  • 100 percent of respondents increased the speed at which they documented clinical records;
  • 75 percent of the respondents reported increased clinical documentation accuracy; and
  • Nearly 90 percent of nurse respondents reported improved job satisfaction.

Dragon Medical One, a HITRUST CSF certified solution, is completely cloud-based and seamlessly integrated into existing workflows so users can enjoy consistent documentation experiences regardless of their location. Greater ease of installation and virtualization support, higher portability and access, greater accuracy, and built-in productivity tools all contributed to increases in adoption.

“Concord Hospital is a tremendous institution that understands the importance of our deep product integration with Cerner and how this provides their physicians, nurses and other staff at the Hospital with unified voice-driven clinical documentation to optimize productivity,” said Michael Clark, general manager provider solutions at Nuance Healthcare. “At Nuance, we are committed to improving the experience of physicians, nurses and other staff by reducing the burden of documentation through AI-powered solutions. The productivity benefits Concord Hospital’s care teams experience with Dragon Medical One and PowerMic Mobile helps reduce burnout while enabling them to save valuable time that they are now able to repurpose back into patient care.”

Nuance Showcases Portfolio of AI-Powered Solutions at CHC18

In addition to demonstrating Dragon Medical One, including new built-in productivity tools like Dragon Medical Clinical Calculators and Advanced Step-by-Step Commands, Nuance will be exhibiting its suite of AI-powered clinical documentation and computer-assisted physician documentation (CAPD) solutions at the Cerner Health Conference (CHC) booth #501, October 8-11, 2018.

About Nuance Healthcare
Nuance provides intelligent systems that support a more natural and insightful approach to clinical documentation, freeing clinicians to spend more time caring for patients. Nuance healthcare solutions capture, improve and communicate more than 300 million patient stories each year, helping more than 500,000 clinicians in 10,000 global healthcare organizations to drive meaningful clinical and financial outcomes. Nuance’s award-winning clinical speech recognition, medical transcription, CDI, coding, quality and medical imaging solutions provide a more complete and accurate view of patient care.

About Nuance Communications, Inc.
Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) is the pioneer and leader in conversational AI innovations that bring intelligence to everyday work and life. The company delivers solutions that can understand, analyze and respond to human language to increase productivity and amplify human intelligence. With decades of domain and artificial intelligence expertise, Nuance works with thousands of organizations – in global industries that include healthcare, telecommunications, automotive, financial services, and retail – to create stronger relationships and better experiences for their customers and workforce. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.

Trademark reference: Nuance and the Nuance logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners.

Media Contact Information
Palmer Reuther
Corporate Communications
Nuance Healthcare
M: 978-697-9227
palmer.reuther@nuance.com