The nexvoice solution enables doctors to electronically write patient documentation in real-time using only voice. vdocs digitizes the primary level of the physician/patient encounter (the examination note) and allows a doctor to personally manipulate that document into referral letters, prescriptions and medical charts using only voice.

vdocs represents the first major paradigm shift for physician documentation since PC-based CPT coding and is a major step toward the medical industry’s goal of electronic records keeping. Since doctors, in general, do not use computers, they spend an estimated $10,000+ per year on manual dictation and medical transcription. Voice enabling this process reduces costs by 30%-75%. Replacing other standard handwritten/dictated processes, vdocs saves 8-20 hours per week of administrative time. A doctor can re-channel this time to increase patient care, schedule more patients and thereby increase practice revenues.

BUSINESS MODEL

Prior to nexvoice, individual computer consultants known as Value Added Resellers (VARs) have driven the voice-computing market on a fragmented basis. So far, the telecom industry has achieved the only successful integration of voice, but that function is still limited to voice activation. vdocs provides a 100% interactive experience enabling users to completely operate any computing device using only voice. nexvoice’s goal is to digitize the entire physician/patient encounter from exam notes to CPT coding and ICD-9’s (critical Payer/Provider documentation) on a voice interaction platform and support that technology on a national scale.

“Instead of spending all of our effort just creating the ‘next great product’ we saw the importance of developing a seamless nationwide sales and support infrastructure concurrent with our digital strategy,” said Donald H. (Don) Turner, nexvoice CEO and president. “Historically, that has been the greatest gap in medical computing as well as the deployment of voice technology.”

Founded in July 2000, nexvoice bypassed traditional stage 1 and 2 financing to bring vdocs to market in six months with only $1.15 million in angle funding above the founders’ original $500,000 investment. The unusual nexvoice business model included strategic partnerships with MSI International and Productivity Point, Inc. to strengthen the sales and training strategy as well as the acquisition of key technology for vdocs development.

Only two of the 212 pre-launch sales contacts made last week declined a product demo, tracking with nexvoice’s sales projections of $500,000 in Q1 and $1 million per month by the summer.

TECHNOLOGY

Voice is the next evolution of human-computer interaction. vdocs cures the technical issues that have stifled market acceptability of voice over the last decade. While base-line speech recognition has been around since the early 1990’s, limited dialect interpretation, heavy processor requirements, instability issues, a lack of adequate training and customization have plagued the industry. Consequently, three out of every four retail packages sold have been returned. vdocs’ architecture and integrated applications make it the most stable, most accurate, easiest to use computer voice command and control product on the market.

Last fall, nexvoice acquired and integrated KnowBrainer® and VerbalBasic® into vdocs. These programs allow the user to completely command and control any Windows®-based application using only voice. The KnowBrainer component further increases documentation speed by allowing users to leverage 50,000 “voice macros” to create unlimited “voice normals,” (blocks of standardized, repetitive copy). VerbalBasic enables the user to program these “normals” using simple voice commands, eliminating the need to learn and type-in codes.

In January, nexvoice acquired and integrated the proprietary hard-coding technology necessary to stabilize the interface between speech engines and Windows applications. This not only improved the beta version of vdocs, but also expedites nexvoice’s development of voice enabled insurance coding and EMR solutions by six to nine months.