MaineHealth To Go Live With New EHR, Speech Tech

Supports 'One Patient, One Record' initiative

PORTLAND, ME  -  As it rolls out a new electronic health record system across eight hospitals, MaineHealth will also deploy speech recognition technology to make it easier and quicker to fill in the patient chart. 

MaineHealth includes Maine Medical Center in Portland, seven other hospitals across the state, as well as physician practices. 

MaineHealth will deploy Dragon Medical 360 | Network Edition from Burlington, Mass.-based Nuance Communications across the health system, which already uses Dragon Medical 360 | eScription, Nuance's hosted transcription service. eScription is what MaineHealth CIO Barry Blumenfeld, MD, describes as a backend system. The physicians dictate as they would in traditional transcription. The words run through an engine and are converted to text that is then reviewed by a transcriptionist.