ZyDoc

In 1993, ZyDoc released one of the first multimedia electronic medical records (EMR) as envisioned by the Institute of Medicine. The prototype was purchased by the Department of Defense and helped serve as a paradigm for the industry. ZyDoc immediately recognized the problem of the data entry bottleneck inherent in the EMR and has been pursuing solutions since then.

The founder, James Maisel, M.D., a retina surgeon, became involved in medical informatics and served as the Chairman of Healthcare Open Systems and Trials (HOST) in 1998. ZyDoc left the EMR arena in 2000 to develop other solutions that would be more efficient for physicians.

Early on, ZyDoc promoted speech recognition technology and created language models for every medical specialty. These were bundled and sold by Dragon Systems Naturally Speaking 4.0 Medical in 2000 and are widespread in the industry. Realizing that speech recognition was only a tool that needed to be embedded within other applications, ZyDoc developed an award-winning multimodal EMR solution in conjunction with Toshiba that allowed physicians to enter information via dictation, touch-screens, keyboard, or mouse.

Usability and support issues for speech recognition limited the success of this EMR and in 2002 ZyDoc turned its attention to medical transcription.

ZyDoc’s medical transcription infrastructure platform was ranked third in competition at TEPR in 2004, and has been licensed to public and private transcription companies. Leveraging this platform for its own use, ZyDoc has grown its transcription business to a nationwide level with a reputation for ease-of-use, high accuracy, fast turnaround time, and full-featured service backed by a 24 x 7 ZyDoc Operations Center.

Recognizing an industry-wide problem for medical informatics due to tremendous increase in security concerns and difficulty in software implementation in physician and hospital environments, ZyDoc.com, the software division of the company, released Bulletproof Messenger in 2009. BPM is a new generation of file transfer software that obviates the need for administrative privileges and bypasses network, security, and firewall constrictions within offices. This application allows physicians with no technology expertise to transmit audio, imaging, and other data files up to 2 GB in size securely and easily. When used in combination with ZyDoc’s proprietary TrackDoc™ web-based object management services, workflow is customizable to accommodate the file transfer requirements of virtually any size healthcare facility. Over 2000 physicians completed beta testing of the software that was released at the HIMSS meeting in April, 2009.