Physician assistant – Alter Wein in neuen Schläuchen?

With the introduction of Apple’s Siri in the last year, free-form speech recognition has exploded in the mainstream. The technology around Siri, however, has been used in the medical field for some time for documentation with programs like well-known Dragon Medical™ by Nuance Healthcare. Nuance’s CMIO, Nick van Terheyden, MD was willing to speak with me about the advances Nuance has made in the domain of speech recognition, data mining, and documentation innovation in the healthcare space. Dr. van Terheyden has been in the healthcare industry for > 25 years, working in imaging and other internet startups before coming to Nuance and finding his niche as a clinician advocate to adopting technology in standard practice. Dragon, now on its 10th medical version has been used commonly within healthcare enterprises, including in radiology reading rooms across the country for dictating reads of XRay/CT/MRI films and more. Over its time, it has been adapted to take into account accents across the world in addition to learning and increasing its vocabulary each time someone dictates. The next innovations in this space are what one would expect: with the data Dragon is collecting, clinical language understanding is growing. With the use of such ontologies […]