Nuance Communications announces the launch of Dragon Medical Advisor, a Computer-Assisted Physician Documentation (CAPD) solution that automatically provides real-time feedback to physicians while they are documenting patient encounters. This improves the completeness of clinical notes and helps provider organizations meet the impending ICD-10 requirements, justify medical necessity of care decisions, and support better patient care.
Building on the work done in 2011 when Nuance pioneered the industry’s first CAPD solution, Dragon Medical Advisor processes physician notes using speech or keyboard, and analyzes the structured and unstructured documentation within the notes, automatically providing physicians with clinical documentation improvement (CDI) recommendations based on industry best practices and guidelines.
Designed for both inpatient and ambulatory settings, Dragon Medical Advisor automatically recognizes when incomplete or unspecific information is entered and provides relevant advice on how to improve the quality of the note. The result is a more comprehensive picture of the patient’s condition, improved efficiency of staff, a reduction in discharged but not final billed (DFNB) charts, and more appropriate reimbursement.
“Building on Nuance’s extensive work with virtual assistants, Dragon Medical Advisor functions like a specialized medical virtual assistant for physicians,” explains Joe Petro, Senior Vice President of Healthcare Research and Development, Nuance Communications. “It provides immediate feedback during clinical documentation and focuses on high-impact areas, such as congestive heart failure, where the lack of required specificity can negatively affect patient care, as well as coding and risk adjustment.”
Query relief for physicians
A recent study found clinicians spend approximately 69 minutes per day searching for information requested by someone else. By providing instant feedback while the patient story is still fresh in the mind of the physician, Dragon Medical Advisor hopes to improve compliance and productivity by reducing input errors.
“Dragon Medical Advisor is a win for physicians because it provides immediate feedback on what to improve in clinical notes while they are still thinking about the patient instead of querying physicians to fix records for patients seen hours or days before,” says Rizwan Pasha, MD, Co-Founder, Physician Technology Partners. “This real-time guidance is also a win for organizations that need CDI starting with physician documentation to achieve the appropriate level of reimbursement without disrupting clinical care.”
Dragon Medical Advisor is available now and will be featured at AHIMA 2015.
