BURLINGTON, MA, July 13, 2015 – Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) today announced it has joined athenahealth’s “More Disruption Please” (MDP) program, making Nuance Dragon Medical 360 part of the athenahealth Marketplace offerings to more readily connect clinicians to the tools they need for a seamless documentation experience. This collaboration enhances the efficiency of clinicians as they use voice recognition to document care and navigate electronic medical records (EMR) in the fast-paced ambulatory setting where more than 30 percent of patients spend 10 minutes or less with physicians.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest analysis published November 2014, ambulatory healthcare services rose nearly 24 percent over a five-year period, and physicians’ offices accounted for nearly half of all ambulatory care services. In 2014 alone, use of Dragon Medical Clinic 360 | Transcription, Nuance’s solution for the ambulatory clinic market, doubled in overall volume as a tool used for capturing clinical documentation. Today, more than half of U.S. clinicians use Nuance Dragon Medical 360 solutions to document care faster using technology that enables them to tell the whole patient story while getting the structured data the industry needs.

“We are excited to partner with Nuance, an industry-leading dictation solution with the goal of saving time and increasing efficiencies for our providers,” said Kyle Armbrester, chief product officer at athenahealth. “The integrated Nuance solution aims to address the many pain points of EMR documentation by seamlessly integrating speech recognition into the workflow – in real-time and on any device.”

“Clinicians want advanced speech solutions that enable them to tell the complete patient story in their own words through streamlined clinical documentation. The inclusion of Nuance Dragon Medical solutions in the athenahealth Marketplace provides thousands of clinicians with a choice of using front-end speech recognition or dictation to easily create patient records directly in athenahealth’s cloud-based EMR,” said Susan Sumner, vice president of ambulatory solutions, Nuance Communications. “This collaboration promotes physician productivity and documentation quality while supporting patient-centric care.”

Nuance clinical documentation solutions to be featured in the athenahealth Marketplace include:

• Dragon® Medical 360 Direct, (available now) a cloud-based clinical speech recognition service with voice profiles that are easily accessed across multiple devices and infrastructures and adapt to clinician’s terms, phrases, and preferences for optimum accuracy and ease of use.
• Dragon Medical Clinic 360 Transcription, (coming soon) a modernized method of traditional documentation that optimizes workflow by allowing clinicians to dictate, review, edit and electronically sign notes using their mobile devices.

athenahealth’s “More Disruption Please” is a partnership program aimed at leveraging the scalability of the cloud to advance innovation in healthcare for the overall improvement in the way patient care is coordinated and delivered.

By providing a choice in voice-enabled clinical documentation methods, Nuance maximizes physician productivity and satisfaction in both the acute and ambulatory environment. Read “An arranged marriage: IDNs and acquired physician practices” to learn more about the factors needed for successful clinical documentation of physicians in ambulatory practices to optimize patient care and avoid disrupting clinical workflow in these different care environments.