Northern Health BC goes Crescendo

Laval, Quebec - May 30, 2007 - Crescendo Systems Corporation today announced that it was selected by Northern Health BC to provide a central dictation and transcription platform for the group's 28 remote healthcare facilities and public health units across British Columbia, Canada. This new integrated system is one of the key pillars for the major eHealth initiative within Northern Health, aimed at improving patient care and providing efficient, secure access to critical patient information to the group's care providers. The Crescendo technology was selected following a tender process in December 2006 and is currently being rolled out to over 750 users.

Northern Health provides health services to 390,000 people over an area of 600,000 square kilometers in the province of British Columbia, which is the equivalent of the states of Iowa, Missouri, Illinois and Indiana combined. The group was looking to increase efficiency by linking all its transcription work into one single pool from which it could be easily prioritized and dispatched throughout the region. The group then decided to unify its dictation data as well, to provide a central repository of all patient information. "Most of patient data is dictated then transcribed, this is why we considered a central platform to be the very first, critical step to the electronic patient record," says Doris Gemmell, Project Manager - Integration, Health Link North, Information and Technology Services. 

Over 700 physicians will be able to dictate over the phone (with boom microphones for hands free access in Pathology) or on their PCs while their voice files will be streamed over the transcription pool in real-time thanks to the Crescendo Wide Area Service. Thanks to this very voice streaming technology, CWAS will also ensure optimal security in compliance with PIPEDA requirements (no duplication of file, no file sitting on local PCs, etc.).

The 45 full-time and 40 part-time transcriptionists will be equipped with Crescendo's advanced medical transcription application MedRite-IP for access to unparalleled productivity tools.

"The other key aspect was to ensure a proper integration between the new dictation and transcription platform and other key information systems such as our Cerner RIS, Agfa PACS and McKesson PACS systems," explains Gemmell. "Based on Crescendo's previous interface projects with all major PACS and RIS vendors, we were confident in their ability to help us build the integrated IT environment that is so critical to the quality of patient care." Once the integration is complete, Radiologists will be able to dictate directly from the PACS system without having to open several applications, while patient demographics and other critical information will be fed through various HL7 interfaces.

"We are extremely proud to work with Northern Health on such a large-scale project, both geographically and technically. I believe Northern Healthcare's choice is very representative of the current need of large healthcare groups for premise-based, open-source technology that allows for the efficient management and secure exchange of medical data," concludes Costa Mandilaras, President and co-founder of Crescendo Systems Corp.

About Crescendo
Crescendo develops digital dictation, speech recognition, transcription, workflow and document management systems tailored for the needs of the healthcare sector. Since 1990, the Crescendo premise-based technology has allowed over 2,000 single and multi-site healthcare installations to streamline and cost-efficiently manage the most complex documentation workflows while achieving the cross-system integrations (PACS, RIS, etc.) that are so critical to the quality of patient care. Partners with some of the most respected companies in the world, Crescendo incorporates technology from Philips SpeechMagic, Citrix, Olympus and Grundig and has a worldwide presence. For more information, please visit http://www.crescendo.com/  

Press Contact
Claire Betis
Marketing Manager, Crescendo Systems Corp.
1 800 724 2930