Nick van Terheyden*, Nuance, Laytonsville, United States Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Consumer empowerment, patient-physician relationship, and sociotechnical issues Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: Sheraton Maui Resort Room: C - Napili Date: 2014-11-14 09:45 AM – 10:30 AM Last modified: 2014-09-09

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Medicine is part science. Part art. The relationship between physicians and patients is at the core of healing. This begins with hearing and understanding. How do we return clinicians the focus to the patient? How can physicians navigate the changes and challenges of today’s complex healthcare environment while doing what matters most to them – listening and caring for patients? Physicians don’t go to medical school because they want to document and code clinical information. Doctors choose their path because of their compassion and desire to deliver care to patients in need. There are increasing physician frustrations with technology and their struggle to keep the focus on patients and not data entry.

It is clear that the physician’s voice and medical decision making is what matters most in practicing the art of medicine but this needs to be captured efficiently and without intruding on the physician patient relationship and in the context of the growing list of administrative tasks a doctor must complete—particularly collecting and inputting patient data into electronic health records (EHR). This is taking away from quality, face-to-face time between caregiver and patient.

This session will detail specific ways in which clinicians, medical practices and hospitals can streamline the clinical documentation processes and workflow to be more productive and ease usability for the time pressured clinicians who want to focus on the patient not on the technology.

This presentation will explore innovative new speech technologies that help capture and understand not just what the clinician says but what they mean. With new tools that speech enabled systems we simplify access and empower clinicians to capture information and thoughts as they occur. Through the innovative use of natural language tools, context awareness and the generation of high-value clinically actionable medical information clinical systems become efficiently integrated into care delivery process offering improvements in quality and outcomes and decreasing costs.

Experience will be presented providing insight into how Siri-like technology (intelligent voice interaction) can be applied in a clinical setting. Prototype tools will be presented that open conceptual frameworks for delivering advanced speech enablement at the local and mobile clinical workstation that offer simple access to complex systems and ready access to critical, specific and highly relevant clinically relevant data.


Speech recognition is already delivering significant benefits to doctors in a variety of clinical settings, easing the burden of data entry and simplifying the navigation through complex and confusing clinical systems.

Speech recognition offers significant timesaving’s but it is the overall improvement in the quality of clinical notes that are essential to effective and timely doctor communications. Faced with a future of limited resources and the need to adapt and integrate EMR’s into a busy clinical practice speech recognition is a key technology enabler that frees the doctor from data entry tasks to focus more time on the patient. The resulting qualities of notes are improved, as is the overall communication between clinical colleagues offering higher quality care with fewer resources and improved patient satisfaction.