Nuance Communications has announced that AthletiCo, one of the leaders in fitness services, physical therapy, and occupational therapy, has started using background and front-end speech recognition from Nuance. The technology helps AthletiCo speed up and improve the documentation and sharing of patients’ medical records.
AthletiCo is using the background speech recognition technology of Dictaphone Enterprise Speech System, or “Turbo Speech,” and Nuance’s front-end component, Enterprise Workstation. This has reduced the time and costs used for the clinical documentation, and significantly decreased AthletiCo’s reliance on medical transcription.
“Our dual use of background and front-end speech recognition has significantly reduced our reliance on, and therefore the cost associated with medical transcription,” said Heather Franks, director of operations, and AthletiCo Ltd.  “Moreover, real-time reporting capabilities have allowed our clinicians to create reports instantaneously when necessary.” 
One of the benefits of using Enterprise Workstation is that documentation that was previously handwritten is now created with front-end speech recognition, making legible patient documentation available considerably faster, explained Daphne R. Scott, PT, DSc, regional manager, AthletiCo.  “Various special features of the software, such as creating shortcuts for regularly repeated parts of documentation and pronunciation training for harder to recognize words, including names, allow the system to work effectively and efficiently, and more importantly frees-up time for the clinician.”
Healthcare organizations that rely on traditional medical transcription usually spend more time, money and resources than necessary, according to Peter Durlach, senior vice president, healthcare product strategy and marketing at Nuance.  “AthletiCo’s integrated use of background and front-end speech recognition has delivered benefits that can be replicated for other healthcare organizations working to produce high-quality medical reports, more quickly than with traditional transcription and at a lower cost.  Nuance’s healthcare speech recognition solutions allow customers to create the same volume of work at lower costs.”