Dragon Professional Anywhere Saves Time and Space

Nuance’s latest launch is a cloud-hosted speech-recognition solution that allows social workers and administrators to streamline paperwork with ease of access and use.

By Sue Coyle, MSW

Social work and paperwork are all but synonymous, particularly for those in direct care. Every interaction with a client or their supports must be appropriately documented – sometimes in multiple locations. Finding the time to sit down and type out notes, then fill out forms can be difficult, especially for social workers in the field, whose workweek is often spent in a client’s home or the car.

Nuance Communication’s Dragon speech recognition technology has long been a solution to this time crunch, allowing social workers to dictate rather than type their notes and other paperwork. After all, most people speak much faster and more accurately than they type. Nuance’s latest North American launch – Dragon Professional Anywhere – expands that solution with cloud hosting and an included mobile phone extension for iOS and Android. With Dragon Professional Anywhere, social workers stay up to date on paperwork in real-time from wherever they may be.

Customization

It is important to note that Dragon Professional Anywhere is not just a dictation tool but rather an enterprise, cloud-based speech recognition solution. Social workers and administrators can customize it to match their needs, updating the application with the templates, keywords, and acronyms most commonly employed in day-to-day situations.

For example, a social worker could speak “C & Y” into their laptop or the Dragon Anywhere Mobile app, and see the abbreviation recognized as either “Children and Youth” or typed as the acronym “C & Y,” depending on how the administrator has updated the settings.

Social workers can manage their custom vocabulary at the individual level. Additionally, as Nuance Senior Product Manager Michael Millward explains, “if I’m an administrator for Dragon Professional Anywhere, I can push out common industry-specific terms to all my employees. So [individual users] don’t need to create twenty or thirty words by themselves. They will have it available, and they can add on and create their own customizations.”

Similarly, if new forms are adopted, administrators can push the form out just once to all employees, immediately ensuring that everyone is utilizing the most up-to-date version. Administrators may further customize as needed. Not all terms and acronyms are used or used in the same way by every program within an agency. The same is true of forms. Should an administrator want to update a template for one specific program but not the other, they can easily direct those changes to particular users without affecting others.

Dragon Professional Anywhere is also a speaker-dependent solution, meaning the customization extends beyond forms and keywords. The software learns the individual user’s voice, adapting to their accent, syntax, and other unique qualities. It is therefore optimized for that caseworker when they log into the application.

Cloud-Hosted

One of the key components of Dragon Professional Anywhere is that it is a cloud-based solution hosted on the secure Microsoft Azure network, which features 99.5% uptime and runs on geographically dispersed, redundant (active-active) data centers.

“The traditional Dragon desktop solution is a terrific product,” Millward says, “but it is a large file to download, install, and run on your hard drive. With Dragon Professional Anywhere, it’s a very lightweight Windows client. It takes minutes to install, and you can rapidly deploy the application at scale across the whole agency.”

A key benefit of Dragon Professional Anywhere is that all users have access to the latest version of the application. As a cloud-hosted solution, Dragon Professional Anywhere automatically updates the software without inconveniencing users and IT staff. This means caseworkers and other social services professionals have “always latest” access to the most current version, ensuring the latest enhancements are instantly available to all.

Dragon Anywhere Mobile for cell phones and tablets

Dragon Professional Anywhere is the Windows-based component of the solution. In addition, Dragon Professional Anywhere is bundled, at no additional cost, with the Dragon Anywhere Mobile extension for iOS and Android devices, including iPhones and iPads. The mobile app allows social workers to dictate notes when it is not practical to bring a laptop to their appointment. Because Nuance hosts both applications in Microsoft Azure, the system automatically syncs customizations — like custom forms or commands — created on an iOS or Android device and makes the same customizations available using Dragon Professional Anywhere on the Windows client and vice versa. Dragon Anywhere Mobile also allows social services professionals to easily share information with colleagues via email or other cloud-based sharing apps, like Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox. This means work that began in the field can efficiently be completed back at the office.

This fosters not only ease of use but also immediacy, which increases the likelihood social workers will include details they may have otherwise forgotten over the course of the day. The result is that social workers can easily and more accurately capture their client’s words when writing their notes, when possible and appropriate.

Paperwork is a necessary yet often overwhelming reality for social workers. Thus, social workers need smart tools and resources that help ease their workload without compromising quality. Designed and implemented with field-based professionals in mind, Dragon Professional Anywhere is a revolutionary tool. With this technology, social workers can create accurate, detailed client documentation from anywhere.

To learn more and see a demo of Dragon Professional Anywhere in action, visit: www.Nuance.com/DPA/SocialWork