Meet a Speech Recognition Visionary: Dr. Stephen Rosenthal to appear on Crescendo booth at HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition
Visitors to HIMSS 2008 given exclusive opportunity to meet Dr. Stephen Rosenthal, the first in North America to implement a wireless speech recognition and patient administration solution in an ER setting
LAVAL, CANADA, 15 January 2008 - Crescendo Systems Corporation announced today that Dr. Stephen Rosenthal, MD, will be present on the Crescendo booth (#6843) at this year's HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition (Orlando, FL, February 24-28). Dr. Rosenthal was the first healthcare IT executive in North America to introduce a wireless document creation and management system to his emergency department, a solution that uses PDA devices and speech recognition to accelerate the delivery of critical information at the point of care. Visitors to the conference interested in meeting with Dr. Rosenthal and hearing more about his experiences with wireless speech recognition in person can visit the Crescendo website, where meetings can be booked.

Dr. Rosenthal, Associate Director, Emergency Department, at the Sir Mortimer B. Davis - Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, Quebec, was responsible for pioneering speech recognition technology at his facility. Based on the hospital's existing DigiDictate-CE solution from Crescendo, designed to enable physicians to receive up-to-date patient data and dictate directly from their PDA, a SpeechMagic speech recognition module was added in 2006 to further accelerate the documentation loop.

"We introduced PDA devices that interface with the emergency and patient index system, as well as the speech recognition server. Physicians can now access up-to-date patient data and record their findings all from one single device," explains Dr. Rosenthal. Having turned his vision of a 100% future-proof system into reality, physicians now have access to a 24-seven solution. Document turnaround time has been accelerated significantly and the ER now has documents that are readable, searchable and that deliver suitable information for the electronic chart, making it much easier for physicians to make split-second decisions. The ER is a fast-paced environment, says Rosenthal: "We need to be with patients, we need to be mobile; we can't be tied to a desk."

Dr. Rosenthal is credited with the initiation, development and implementation of medical informatics projects and has implemented electronic records, mobile speech recognition and digital dictation at his hospital. A member of the standards committee for interoperable Electronic Health Records (EHR) at Canada Health Infoway, Dr. Rosenthal has a vision that reaches far beyond the Montreal hospital's walls. "Standardizing information with the help of speech recognition can provide physicians with better decision support across provinces, even countries", he noted.

Visitors to the conference will be able to share Dr. Rosenthal's vision and experiences on the Crescendo booth (#6843) on February 26-27, 2008. Further details are provided at www.crescendo.com.

About Crescendo
From digital dictation and speech recognition (powered by SpeechMagicTM) to transcription and report distribution, Crescendo develops systems that enable the fast, cost-effective creation and management of medical documentation. As a pioneer in open standard technology and an international HL7 member since the 1990s, Crescendo has enabled over 2,000 single and multi-site healthcare installations to achieve the cross-system integrations that are so critical to the quality of patient care today. www.crescendo.com and www.speechrecognition.wordpress.com