Nuance Communications has launched edition four of its Dragon speech recognition system for general and specialist medical practices, promising to relieve the burden of clinical documentation by up to an hour a day.

Dragon Medical Practice Edition 4 has been designed to work with commonly used clinical and practice management software and allows users to dictate straight into the patient record by placing their cursor in the required field and speaking. Dragon converts the voice to text and places it where the cursor is situated.

Edition 4 is available to Australian practices now and it will be released in New Zealand in the next four weeks, a Nuance spokesperson said.