Nuance will unveil its Dragon Medical One Platform at HIMSS16, an evolution of its speech recognition and documentation tool that aims to redefine the relationship clinical users have with healthcare technology, the company says.

According to Jonathon Dreyer, Nuance's director of cloud and mobile solutions marketing, increasing demands on physicians – not least the number of places they need to be and IT systems with which they're supposed to interact – has changed the equation, putting a premium on flexibility and mobility.

Nuance touts its new cloud-based Dragon Medical One platform as a tool to offer physicians a unified speech recognition functionality – irrespective of care settings, workflows, devices or applications.

The new version brings analytics functionality that keep tabs on the time spent documenting, helping health organizations track efficiency and productivity. Additionally, workflow enhancements such as Dragon Medical Advisor offer notes to help improve ICD-10 specificity, case mix index and more. 

A pair of new features, PowerPack and PowerMic Mobile, enable users to tap into evidence-based content using a smartphone as a secure microphone to dictate, edit and navigate the EHR on any workstation.

Whether they are dictating into EHRs or mobile messaging apps, the Dragon Medical One desktop app offers secure speech recognition wherever physicians need to document. With a unique Nuance Healthcare ID, doctors gain access to an ecosystem of personalized tools.

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"We are always interested in technology that improves productivity, and cloud-based speech supports the ways physicians work and eases the effort of entering clinical documentation into patient records," said Don Fosen, director of IT at Naperville, Illinois-based Edward-Elmhurst Hospital, in a prepared statement, noting that the tools "have let us scale voice recognition in a way that we simply couldn't have done in any other way."

Nuance’s Dreyer added that the vendor has been seeing a shift in doctors’ workflow. 

"There's a general trend of physicians being in more places, having to interact with not just the EHR but with other technologies as part of their daily workflow," Dreyer said. 

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This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.