Nowadays, hand-held mobile devices make a significant impact on the health care services. In the midst of this technological transformation, Nuance (News - Alert) Communications, a leader in voice recognition technology, revealed that it’s now offering speech recognition technology on iPhones or iPads of those clinicians who exclusively use an Epic electronic health record system.

With the recent integration of Nuance’s cloud-based voice recognition with the Haiku and Canto applications, users will be able to capture clinical information via Epic Haiku for the iPhone (News - Alert) and Epic Canto for the iPad.

Jonathon Dreyer, Nuance’s director of mobile solutions marketing, sees a clear trend toward mobility in patient care.

Jeffrey Westcott, MD, medical director of the Cardiac Catherization Lab at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, appreciated this change, as it will allow users to document angioplasty, cardiac catheterization, cardiac testing, cardiac ultrasound and echocardiography while on-the-go for increased productivity and more efficient and fast results.

“Clinicians’ work lives are not conducive to a desk and chair; they need the flexibility of a mobile environment to support their workflow – between exam rooms, clinics and hospitals – and all at a moment’s notice, still, issues surrounding the adoption of mobile technologies remain, including limitations surrounding laborious touch screen keyboards,” Janet Dillione, executive vice president and general manager, Nuance Healthcare, further elaborated in a statement. “With voice-enabled mobile EHR applications, clinicians can enjoy the benefits of the Nuance-powered functionality anytime, anywhere.”

Nuance has announced that Cerner (News - Alert) would embed Nuance’s cloud-based medical voice recognition into its full portfolio of mobile EHR solutions.

“Either I didn’t document it," he says, “or I was lucky. I was at home when I got it. So I could start a note on my regular computer, or I did a little note to self, and when I got to an environment where I could link to the electronic medical record, I would go ahead and document what I did.”

Dreyer says. "One of our customers put it best recently: ‘Why poke buttons when you can use your voice?”