Voice-Technology Startup Aims To Get Doctors Using E-RecordsVoice-Technology Startup Aims To Get Doctors Using E-Records

For some doctors, the prospect of trading in their paper-based patient files for electronic-medical-record systems means big changes in their work, and they and their staffs can't afford the initial slowdown as they learn to enter and deal with digitized patient information.

But what if speech-recognition technology was good enough to actually understand and digitize not just a doctor's words to include in medical records, but the medical lingo held in them? A startup tech vendor led by George Newstrom, the former secretary of technology for Virginia under Gov. Mark Warner, is making plans for such technology to be one of the many tools for getting more doctors using electronic records.

Wisper Technologies LLC--which is owned by the IT integrator IMC Inc., where Newstrom is on the board of directors--is developing software that combines wireless communication, speech recognition, natural language processing, and clinical ontologies (that's the medical lingo) to form a voice-controlled documentation system. If it works as promised, Wisper would capture the information and extract and integrate key data into existing electronic-health-record and other clinical systems, as well as apply diagnosis codes for billing systems.

"The secret sauce of this is the ontology of the industry," or the ability for the system to recognize and handle medical industry vernacular, says Newstrom, president and CEO of Wisper. Newstrom joined Wisper in November, a month after finishing a 2-1/2 year stint in state government, prior to which he spent 28 years at EDS, mostly working for the health-care and government sectors.

Newstrom hopes to license the Wisper technology--which is short for Wireless Standardized Portable Electronic Records--to third-party vendors in the health-care industry that would combine the technology into their own offerings. "Wisper's future lies in being [like] the 'Dolby' inside other systems," allowing its capabilities to be encapsulated in other health-care vendors' offerings, says Gartner research director Barry Hieb. Hieb says there already are some medical-transcription vendors that offer speech-recognition capabilities that help convert doctors' spoken dictation into text, but those systems don't extract the word or data and integrate it to other systems, like E-health record or billing software.

Newstrom doesn't have any buyers yet, but Wisper is working on a federal grant that could have the Department of Defense using the technology in the next six months, he says. Newstrom won't elaborate about the grant, except to say the technology can withstand loud background noise and "can record accurately even with bullets flying and bombs exploding."

In a hospital or clinic setting, for instance, the Wisper technology could be used by physicians along with BlueTooth wireless devices, PDAs and existing servers, PCs, and networks, he says. For instance, if a vendor of an electronic-health-record system incorporated the technology into its product, it might let physicians choose whether to speak or type patient data. Says Hieb: "The secret of success [for electronic health records and other clinical systems] is to allow physicians to do this whichever way they are most comfortable."