Nuance's Dictaphone Healthcare Solutions' New Enterprise Express Speech System Provides Customers with Dramatic Transcription Savings

Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN), a leading supplier of speech solutions, today announced that its new Dictaphone Healthcare Solutions’ Enterprise Express® Speech System™, a speech-assisted transcription solution, has successfully driven significant improvements in medical transcription productivity for healthcare provider organizations including: Affinity Health System (Menasha, Wisconsin) Carolinas Medical Center - NorthEast (Concord, North Carolina) Holyoke Medical Center (Holyoke, Massachusetts) MountainView Hospital (Las Vegas, Nevada) Southern Hills Hospital (Las Vegas, Nevada) Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center (Las Vegas, Nevada) Swedish Medical Center (Seattle, Washington) Now generally available, the Enterprise Express Speech System has been deployed over the past three-to-six months at various healthcare organizations to reduce transcription costs, speed medical report creation and increase overall productivity and satisfaction of medical transcriptionists without impacting physician workload or productivity. "We incorporated the Enterprise Express Speech System into our transcription process in the summer of 2007 and have since seen a substantial productivity gain across our transcriptionist team with minimal training and management,” said LeeAnn Spoehr, director of health information management, Affinity Medical Group, part of Affinity Health System. ”The productivity gain is so apparent that we are reviewing the performance standard to which we hold our transcriptionists to. Additionally our team has noticed substantial improvements in accuracy on the text drafts that are created from speech-recognized dictation from our providers. The system is helping Affinity to create more accurate and detailed reports because of its built-in medical vocabulary.” Feedback from early customers using the new Enterprise Express Speech System includes: Increased Volume of Speech-Recognized Dictation Up to 90 Percent of Total Volume (as compared with traditional dictation/transcription) – Physicians dictate while speech recognition technology translates each dictation into highly accurate, formatted draft documents for review without requiring formal system training. Improved Usability – Transcriptionists benefit from reviewing and editing highly accurate, formatted draft documents instead of transcribing dictated reports from scratch. Speed in Medical Report Creation – Dragon® Speech Technology provides significantly increased accuracy of free-form telephony dictation. Proprietary medical language models and customized formatting technology delivers a more accurate draft, speeding the time it takes to create a final report. Improved Accuracy in Medical Reports – Dictaphone’s "Smart ReWrite™” technology learns the structure and style of each physician’s documents and automatically corrects grammar mistakes, handles rephrasing, customizes formatting and learns new medical terminology. TransTech Medical Solutions, a national provider of outsourced medical transcription and healthcare documentation services, provides transcription services for three Sunrise Health facilities: Sunrise Hospital, Southern Hills Hospital and MountainView Hospital. Tracy L. Boesch, president and chief operating officer, said "We started using the Enterprise Express Speech System in late October of 2007 and have already seen a 500 percent increase in speech-recognized drafted reports. While just 20 members of our team of 300 transcriptionists are using the system now, we plan to expand its use significantly. In only 60 days we’ve seen dramatic productivity climbs and our team loves the system.” Carolinas Medical Center Northeast (CMC-NorthEast) started using the Enterprise Express Speech System last fall. A total of 319 physicians and 18 fulltime transcriptionists began using the technology and saw an immediate, quantifiable impact. According to Sandra Hardin, transcription manager for the health information management department at CMC-NorthEast: 90 percent of CMC-NorthEast’s medical reports are now generated through Dictaphone’s speech-recognized dictation and transcription editing process. CMC-NorthEast’s 18 transcriptionists now produce speech-recognized medical reports at 300 lines per hour, well above the industry average of 150 lines per hour. One top performing transcriptionist has achieved 470 lines per hour, a new high productivity accomplishment at CMC-NorthEast. CMC-NorthEast’s average recognition accuracy of speech-recognized reports is 97 percent. The average turnaround time of medical reports has been reduced from 40 hours to 24 hours, despite the fact that CMC-NorthEast has been understaffed by three transcriptionists. The Enterprise Express Speech System has created new in-house transcription capacity. "The Enterprise Express Speech System was designed 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 healthcare providers and transcription partners who have utilized our new Enterprise Express Speech System have seen significant and immediate productivity gains across their transcription teams, with very little training or impact on workflow. We expect this trend to continue as more organizations leverage the system as their clear choice for an enhanced transcription productivity tool.” The Enterprise Express Speech System seamlessly integrates with Dictaphone’s Enterprise Express® 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® hosted service. For further information on Dictaphone’s Enterprise Express Speech System, please contact Dictaphone at 1-800-350-4836. Dictaphone Healthcare Solutions Division Dictaphone Healthcare Solutions is a division of Nuance Communications, a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions. Dictaphone provides the most comprehensive family of speech-driven clinical documentation and communications solutions. Dictaphone® solutions orchestrate and optimize clinical workflow, reduce transcription expense, raise standards of care via more thorough documentation, deliver results rapidly to meet patient safety guidelines, and heighten clinician satisfaction by making EMR systems easy to use. Dictaphone’s solutions accelerate the adoption of clinical information systems, so provider organizations can maximize the return from their IT investments. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com/dictaphone/. 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, Enterprise Express, Speech System, Smart ReWrite, 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.