Dictaphone Announces Next Generation Enterprise Express Speech System; Provides Significantly Enhanced Medical Transcription Productivity.

New Technology Enables Healthcare Customers and Transcription Partners to Accelerate Adoption of Back-End Speech Recognition, Reduce Transcription Costs and Speed Report Turnaround Time 

PHILADELPHIA -- Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN), a leading supplier of speech solutions, today announced the next generation of Nuance's Enterprise Express Speech System[TM]. The Enterprise Express Speech System is a speech-assisted transcription solution to better answer the needs of healthcare provider organizations and medical transcription companies working to reduce transcription costs, improve turnaround time, and increase overall productivity and satisfaction of their medical transcriptionists. AHIMA event attendees can view a demo at the Nuance booth, #724.

In response to heightened demand from the healthcare industry for an enterprise-wide solution that helps speed medical report creation and decrease costs without impacting physician workload or productivity, the Enterprise Express Speech System:

* Delivers market leading speech technology - driven by Nuance's industry-leading Dragon([R]) Speech Technology, the Enterprise Express Speech System provides significantly increased accuracy of free-form telephony dictation.

* Increases transcriptionist productivity - by allowing transcriptionists to review and edit highly accurate, formatted draft documents instead of transcribing dictated reports from scratch.

* Supports enterprise-wide deployments - across all medical specialties through proprietary medical language models and customized formatting technology.

* Eliminates barriers associated with speech technology adoption - by enabling physicians to dictate as they normally would, while speech recognition technology translates each dictation into highly accurate, formatted draft documents for transcription review without requiring formal system training.

* Introduces Dictaphone's "Smart ReWrite[TM]" - a new proprietary technology from Dictaphone, that learns the structure and style of each physician's documents and can automatically correct grammar mistakes, handle rephrasing, customize formatting, and learn new medical terminology.

* Delivers an improved speech editing application - for enhanced medical editing to accelerate transcriptionist utilization and improve overall productivity.

"Incorporating speech technology to speed our report creation process without changing our physicians' normal dictation behavior was a top priority of ours," said Sandra Hardin, transcription manager for the health information management department at Carolinas Medical Center Northeast. "Through the use of the Enterprise Express Speech System we've already realized benefits. Our report turnaround time is averaging 24 hours or less; cutting in half what it was before. Additionally, despite the fact that we are experiencing a heavier amount of dictation volume, we are getting significantly more work done with some transcriptionists increasing their workload by up to 75 percent."

The Enterprise Express Speech System seamlessly integrates with Dictaphone's Enterprise Express[TM] platform, the industry's gold standard in clinical documentation workflow, allowing existing customers to extend their document and dictation technology investment. Customers can deploy the new Enterprise Express Speech System within their own facility or utilize Dictaphone's iChart([R]) hosted service.

"Dictaphone has a full range of speech-recognition solutions to help healthcare organizations improve the clinical documentation process, while lowering costs and enhancing operational efficiency," said Peter Durlach, senior vice president, marketing and product strategy, Dictaphone Healthcare Solutions, Nuance. "The significantly enhanced capabilities of our new Enterprise Express Speech System are based on years of development and build on our philosophy of maximizing productivity to deliver highly accurate medical reports without impacting workflow, so that providers will experience zero change to their daily process, while the organization reaps significant rewards."

Dictaphone Healthcare Solutions, a division of Nuance, is located at AHIMA booth #724. For further information on Dictaphone's Enterprise Express Speech System, please contact Dictaphone at 1-800-350-4836.

Nuance Communications, Inc.

Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN) is a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance's proven applications and professional services. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.

Nuance, the Nuance logo and Dictaphone are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other company names or product names may be the trademarks of their respective owners.