Healthcare speech recognition vendor Nuance has released its Dragon Medical 10 solution for use in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The company claims the latest release of the tool is 20 percent more accurate and nearly twice as fast as its previous iteration.

New features included with Dragon Medical 10 include new medical vocabularies, hidden mode, extended mobile dictation support, and advanced voice shortcuts and templates.

Faster and more accurate speech recognition means potentially improving clinicians' documentation procedures, making documents more readily available and reducing patient wait times. The last of these is particularly important to the current UK market, according to Nuance officials.

"The NHS Improvement Plan of 2004 called for the waiting time between a patient's referral and the start of treatment to be no longer than 18 weeks," said Marcel Wassink, vice president of EMEA Healthcare of Nuance Communications. Wassink said Dragon Medical 10 can help reduce referral to treatment times by allowing for instantaneous document creation. "This eliminates idle times in the RTT process when, for example, a request is sent to a hospital immediately after a patient's visit to their general practitioner."

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