September 13, 2017 — Nuance Communications Inc. announced that Citizens Medical Center, a critical access hospital in rural Kansas, has completed a hospital-wide deployment of Nuance solutions to reduce transcription costs and improve physician satisfaction, productivity and efficiency. The implementation includes Dragon Medical One, eScription RH, PowerMic Mobile and the PowerShare Network.
Critical access hospitals face a number of challenging issues in providing care due to rural locations, heavy regulations and restrictive budgets. Citizens Medical Center, in particular, was struggling with the performance and accuracy of the cumbersome speech recognition solution already in place, which led to poor clinical documentation turnaround time, prohibitive documentation costs, and low physician productivity and satisfaction. For example, similar to most critical access hospitals, Citizens Medical Center employs visiting physicians from outside institutions, who struggled with having to resave their personal voice profiles each time they entered the facility, causing delay and frustration.
“After joining the Citizens Medical team, I took a hard look at the technology already in place and realized a change was needed for us to succeed in providing quality healthcare more efficiently,” said Jacee Dobbs, chief information officer, Citizens Medical Center. “We needed flexible, affordable solutions that would grow with us as our needs changed. The clear choice was Nuance due to its seamless, consistent experience across multiple lines of business – a key asset in our critical access hospital environment.”
Given Citizens Medical Center’s financial needs, Nuance’s cloud-based solutions fit well into the hospital’s environment due to term-based pricing that does not require a large, upfront capital investment. Citizens Medical Center chose to implement Nuance’s Dragon Medical One, PowerMic Mobile and eScription RH solutions to improve speech accuracy and provider productivity, provide mobility options for clinicians and optimize the organization’s electronic health record system (EHR).
The speech recognition solutions reduced documentation costs for the facility, and improved satisfaction and quality of life for physicians through streamlined workflows and a single voice profile that allows them to be more efficient across new devices, workflows and applications — in the EHR and beyond. Physicians surveyed at Citizens Medical Center agreed that Dragon Medical One made it easier to capture the patient story and helped improve documentation quality. The secure, cloud-based speech recognition solution is hosted on the Microsoft Azure HITRUST CSF certified platform, and is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning advancements that increase physician efficiency and return on investment.
Additionally, Citizens Medical Center deployed Nuance’s PowerShare Network, which removed CDs from the image exchange workflow, resulting in more streamlined workflows for physicians, increasing satisfaction. PowerShare also improved patient care, as the ability to access medical images from the cloud decreases time to diagnosis and reduces the need for repeat tests and scans.
For more information: www.nuance.com
June 15, 2026 
