Nuance extends mobile apps to medical field

As more healthcare professionals turn to mobile to increase their efficiency, Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) is extending its popular dictation and search mobile apps to tap this burgeoning market. The speech-to-text vendor today announced medical versions of its dictation, search and mobile-recorder apps for physicians and medical professionals.

The apps were introduced today at the healthcare-focused HIMSS conference taking place in Atlanta. All three apps extend Nuance’s Dragon line of dictation and search consumer services, which are powered by its Dragon NaturallySpeaking software. The first, Dragon Medical Mobile Dictation, lets clinicians dictate, rather than type, patient notes, emails and text messages right on their smartphone. Dragon Medical Mobile Search on the iPhone enables them to voice search a list of medical Web sites, including MedLine, Epocrates and Google, which also announced mobile news at the show. The third, Dragon Medical Mobile Recorder, a store-and-forward app unique to Nuance’s healthcare practice that focuses on voice capture and transcription through Nuance’s eScription and Dictaphone Enterprise Speech System software. The Search app will come out at the end of April with the others expected before the year’s end.

In addition, Nuance unveiled its Dragon Medical Mobile software development kit aimed at third-party healthcare information technology companies and Nuance partners looking to incorporate the Dragon capabilities into medical apps. The company has already signed up healthcare IT provider Eclipsys to embed the mobile SDK in its navigation and clinical documentation apps. Peter Durlach, senior vice president of marketing and product strategy for Nuance Healthcare said it also works with more than 5,000 healthcare provider organizations worldwide for its PC-based documentation and transcription services.

According to Manhattan Research, Nuance is tapping a potentially huge opportunity. The firm said that 81% of physicians will be using smartphones by the end of 2011. The iPhone, which houses more than 1,000 mobile health apps, could lead the charge too. Nuance said that the BlackBerry is still the smartphone of choice amongst physicians, but take up of iPhones in the profession has almost doubled between 2008 and 2009. That’s why the company has been focusing on Apple products of late, following the success of its Dragon line on the iPhone and its recent acquisition of MacSpeech, a company that uses its Dragon software on Mac computers and will allow Nuance to target the upcoming Apple iPad as well.

“The penetration of iPhones with physicians is astronomical,” Durlach said. “It’s hard to go into a site where physicians – even if the enterprise doesn’t support the iPhone – just go buy them anyway because it’s so easy to use. The IT organizations are getting dragged along to support the iPhone and clinicians are clamoring for applications on the iPhone.”

According to Juniper Research, m-health is also a huge opportunity for machine-to-machine communications. Healthcare monitoring apps will begin to reach the commercial roll-out stage from 2012, the firm said, but will explode as the aging population requires more health care and electronic health record initiatives take hold.

This is an opportunity that wireless operators are anxious to tap as well. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse was the first wireless operator to keynote the HIMSS show today, and he took the stage to expound the virtues of mobile healthcare, which Sprint expects to really take off when 4G networks are more widely deployed.

Hesse said that more advanced, data-heavy healthcare functions, such as live streaming video, on-demand apps and virtual office visits, will require a lot more bandwidth for instantaneous exchanges. Sprint, which is building out its WiMax strategy this year in the US, is exploring the M2M opportunity to take healthcare beyond smartphones. Some potential use cases Hesse stated included large radiology images accessible from anywhere to speed-up diagnostics and care plan execution; live surgery broadcast through a wireless video transmission in real time without having to wire an operating room or an ambulance that’s able to broadcast live video of EMTs treating a patient while on the way to the hospital.

“From point of care delivered at an accident site or emergency room, to recovery and follow-up monitoring and in-home care, wireless technology, combined with mobile machine-to-machine applications, can be integrated across the entire care continuum,” Hesse said in his HIMSS keynote focused on seeking partners in healthcare. “More and more health care providers will implement these advanced solutions.”