Cindy Thomas and I enjoyed Sunday and Monday meetings with our transcription industry colleagues at the annual HIMSS conference in Atlanta, GA.  I spent a significant amount of time at the Health Story Project Kiosk in the Interoperability Showcase (pic below) talking to people about the power of Clinical Document Architecture (CDA).  We also visited with Verizon and members of the Transcription Industry Consortium on the Medical Data Exchange network being announced today.

InfraWare will be represented at next week’s annual HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) conference in Atlanta, GA. I am on the Health Story Project’s Executive Committee and will be at the Health Story Project kiosk in the Interoperability Showcase all afternoon on Monday, February 1st. The Interoperability Showcase is specifically for technologies that simplify communication among disparate systems. If you will be attending this conference, please stop by and say hi to Nick.

InfraWare is a promoter (highest level member) of the Health Story Project because this initiative fits our strategic vision for helping transcription providers to add value to delivered reports. InfraWare expects to provide customers with a low-cost, high impact vehicle for document delivery that eventually renders those old interfaces obsolete.  Transcription providers will be able to provide an EMR-ready document with extended value at a reduced cost. We are currently developing to the Health Story Project vision and you will hear more about this later in 2010.

You can read more about the Health Story Project here.

I am pleased to announce that InfraWare has named David Cochran our permanent CIO.  After accepting the position in an interim capacity in 2009, Dave has contributed significantly to our organization's execution capacity and has fit nicely into our team's culture.   Dave has leadership and management responsibility for the technical side of the organization including development, production and support.

As this holiday season begins, the InfraWare team and I are thankful.  We have a thriving business, great customers and an outstanding outlook for the future.  Many aren't so fortunate, especially in this depressed economy.  We must do what we can to help others.  This year, I will volunteer to ring the Salvation Army bell (just for one shift) for the 10th year in a row.  I started doing it to help my local Rotary Club with a service project to give back to the community.  To be completely honest, I think I get more out of it than I give.  Watching parents give their young children a dollar bill or pocket-full of change to drop in the bucket is priceless.  It reminds me of the warmth and generosity that runs so deep in the fabric of the American culture.

There is nothing quite as good as getting to talk with a customer face to face.  In this global economy with remote sales via web meetings and conference calls, it is common to have customers we've never met in person.  This week, Cindy Thomas and I took to the air to visit customers in the southeast.  We visited with a couple old friends, but many of these meetings were the first in-person encounter with customers who have joined the platform in 2009.  We had meetings in Knoxville, TN then the following stops in FL: Jacksonville, Tampa, Sarasota, Miami and Orlando.  Six meetings in three days.  We shared a lot and learned a lot.  Strong relationships are key to our future and we hope to meet all of our customers eventually.

Today is the day!  After years of work, and the largest R&D effort we have ever undertaken, the InfraWare team is announcing the 3rd generation of our back-end speech recognition service.  Dubbed the First Draft Dictation Recognition service, this is much more than a new version.  It is a revolutionary change that will empower transcription organizations to reach new levels of productivity.  Here is the press release:

https://www.infraware.com/files/Press_Release-Introducing_First_Draft_Dictation_Recognition.pdf

And here is a video introduction to the new service:

http://videos.infraware.com/avc-fullscreen.aspx?v=84

Each day the evening news reminds us of the seriousness of this recession.  More jobs lost, more failed businesses and more government intervention.  It makes me thankful to be in the growing health information field. 

InfraWare set another production record in month of July, and I believe we will continue to better those results with each calendar month through the rest of the year and beyond.  We continue to acquire new customers, and our technology continues to empower growth of existing customers.  We've worked hard for these results, but I also keep in mind that there is some luck involved.  Health IT has not been hit in the recession like most industries.  There are many charged political debates on healthcare reform right now, but there is near universal agreement on the need for more automation and electronic records.  We are proud to help our customers produce accurate medical reports more efficiently, pulling time and cost out of this important process.

Today is our 3rd and last day at this year's ACE.  What a great conference!  This is the last day for exhibiting.  We have enjoyed meeting new contacts as well as connecting with customers other familiar faces.  Pictured below are Cindy Thomas and Linda Nabors of our team.

We used this huge annual event to make an exciting announcement about release of our 3rd generation back-end speech recognition service.  This First Draft Dictation Recognition Service is our best innovation yet.  Formal announcements and details will be released via the web next week.  Stay tuned!

With the AHDI Conference (ACE) coming up next week, the association asked me to record and submit a multi-media welcome message for attendees to see outside the exhibit hall.  The InfraWare team and I are excited to be using the ACE event to announce our all new First Draft service.  We'll be introducing our new artificial intelligence (AI) engine, and the following link plays the short video I submitted: 

InfraWare AHDI Welcome Message.wmv (4.95 mb)

I have a lot of enthusiasm for a technical initiative our team is preparing to launch.   Usually, we think of high quality audio files as being large in size and needing to sacrifice quality in order to be made smaller.  From our beginning, InfraWare has used WMA files for playback by transcriptionists in the InfraWare Transcription Client (ITC).  Those are highly compressed files that sound pretty good.  End of story?  Not for our engineers. 

For over a year, they have been laying the groundwork for a dramatic improvement, and the time is finally near.  Beginning soon, they will be changing the codec (a technical term for describing how a WMA or other audio file is encoded and decoded by Windows) for the better.  The new codec will sound better and be 75% smaller.  That means jobs will download in only 25% of the time that they have taken in the past.  Now that's innovation!

In the big picture, regular WMA files like the ones we employ today use a well rounded encoding that is suitable for voice and music.  The new encoding will focus only on the audio spectrum used by voice.  By ignoring the audio range not used by voice, this new encoding does a better job of capturing great quality voice in an even smaller size.  Customers who have tested this process have been delighted with both the improved transaction speed and the sound of the playback.  The implementation of this new codec has taken a long time because many components of the platform have had to be upgraded to prepare for the change.  The release of the ITC 2009 was the last major update.  It is a real pleasure to see things become better, faster, cheaper.