Royal Philips Electronics have announced that their speech recognition system SpeechMagic has successfully received ‘Citrix Ready’ status, which will allow thousands of clinicians to remotely access speech recognition from any location.
The SpeechMagic system is already used by thousands of clinicians globally and Philips say that thanks to the Citrix technology it will now be accessible to over 50 million Citrix users in 180,000 sites world-wide.
Citrix Ready is an initiative by Citrix Systems to help its customers identify recommended third-party solutions that are trusted to sensibly enhance the Citrix application delivery infrastructure, designed to enable users to remotely access key applications.
SpeechMagic had to go through strict verification testing before joining the Citrix Ready initiative.
Philips’ chief medical officer, Nick Van Terheyden, told E-Health Europe: “By achieving Citrix Ready status we have essentially solved the fundamental problems of speech recognition by authorised clinicians at any desktop. Now clinicians can log onto any computer with a microphone and access the system remotely recording their notes onto a system to auto-transcribe.”
Robert Thornton, commercial director for Philips Speech Recognition Systems, said: “The adoption of SpeechMagic in the healthcare sector has reached a new dimension, with breakthrough implementations on a city and region-wide scale. Many of these projects require the deployment of industrial grade speech recognition within a Citrix-based IT infrastructure.
Thornton added: "Philips is the first to advance its speech recognition technology to fully support Citrix infrastructure as part of the Citrix Ready initiative, thus enabling our integration partners to quickly deliver on changing market needs.”
Van Terheyden said that the product was available now to all SpeechMagic customers and will be available in all 23 languages the system is currently offered in.
He added: “The great thing about this new system is that it will help healthcare workers to securely dictate notes to their hospital files from wherever they are so long as they can meet the strict security requirements of Citrix to get access to the hospital server first.
“In such a time sensitive environment as healthcare, the need for fast and accurate speech recognition is essential. SpeechMagic offers this and promotes access across a wireless community, exploiting access technologies such as Bluetooth enabled microphones and strong powered servers. The system is very easy to roll out with interest already coming from the US and Spain.”
David Jones, corporate vice president, business development, for Citrix said: “Philips and Citrix have been working closely together on increasing documentation efficiency in organisations running on Citrix application delivery infrastructure and hence improving the return on their investment in our technology. Philips has invested significant resources in adapting SpeechMagic to Citrix requirements and we are looking forward to furthering the penetration of speech recognition, digital dictation and transcription with the Citrix community.”
The Citrix Ready initiative currently supports Citrix Presentation ServerT 4 (32 and 64-bit versions), Citrix Password ManagerT 4.5 and Citrix NetScaler. Support for additional Citrix products will be added throughout 2007.
Links