For all the talk that doctors are putting down their iPads, one company is keen to show that the tablets can play an important role for its voice-enabling software in healthcare settings.
Dr. Brian Phelps, the CEO of Montrue Technologies and a former emergency room physician, said he had a very clear idea of what the app needed to do to win converts from the pilot program in which two dozen doctors and nurses use the Sparrow EDIS software app on iPads. The app is designed to work with the hospital system’s underlying software.
Montrue won Nuance‘s Mobile Clinician Voice Challenge earlier this year in which competitors devised apps using the company’s voice software.
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A company has used Nuance’s voice technology for iPads for dictation at the point-of-care, looking at prescription interaction issues, creating prescription orders and sharing discharge details. Montrue Technologies’ app is currently being tested in a pilot program at a community hospital in Oregon.
Hospital chief information officers tend to hate Apple because its software doesn’t work well with the provider’s software, which is geared for PCs, a particular concern regarding security issues.
“The goal for us is to have people test it who hate computers, [people] who are late adopters, and to make it work without significant training,” Phelps said. “The idea is there is a broad range of users in medicine. For any good mobile device app … it’s about making the app intelligent enough to know what the user wants to do at a particular time.”
One of the goals of the app is to make data more manageable to reduce medical errors. “We spent one year before we even started coding to understand what [hospital staff] wanted. We built a mock emergency room and that’s not a simple thing.”
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Jonathon Dreyer, Nuance’s senior manager for mobile solutions marketing, said its voice technology, through its 360Development Platform, can convert spoken words into text that can be used throughout a variety of healthcare apps, including electronic medical records, specialty point-of-care documentation solutions, access to resources, care coordination and disease management tools.
The platform is made up of two services that provide speech recognition and clinical language understanding to its partner community, but the framework is in place to launch additional services on top of what’s already there.
Brian Phelps, Montrue Technologies