Microsoft, Nuance Join Forces to Transform Healthcare with Artificial Intelligence

Microsoft and Nuance have announced a strategic partnership to transform healthcare by accelerating the delivery of ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) technologies.

A recent study shows that physicians are spending two hours on paperwork for every hour spent interacting with patients, leading to increased cases of physicians feeling burnt out.

“Physician burnout has become one of the most important concerns facing the healthcare industry today,” said Dr. James Linder, Nebraska Medicine CEO. “We’re excited about the early results of ACI to help clinicians focus more on patients. We look forward to the innovations our two trusted partners, Nuance and Microsoft, will deliver together.”

The partnership brings together two companies possessing leading technologies in the fields of speech recognition and transcription and advanced conversational AI that will help clinicians spend more time with patients and less time filling out paperwork.

“The Microsoft partnership will accelerate our ability to solve for healthcare’s most pressing challenges — together,” said Mark Benjamin, Nuance CEO. “The ambient technologies we will jointly deliver can improve productivity and professional satisfaction, while empowering doctors to focus on what they do best: take care of patients.”

Nuance’s Dragon Medical platform is already in use by more than five hundred-thousand physicians around the world. Nuance also recently announced it has expanded Clinical Guidance for its Dragon Medical Advisor product, which is designed at helping physicians keep track of patient records and aims to increase the amount of time they can spend interacting with patients.

Microsoft’s Azure AI and Project EmpowerMD Intelligent Scribe Service are industry-leading natural language conversational AI systems that allow physicians to interact with their patients without having to concern themselves with note-taking. The software can listen to a conversation, pick out key pieces of information relevant to a diagnosis, and fill out paperwork automatically.

Together, these technologies are the backbone of ACI, and by joining forces Microsoft and Nuance are bringing the exam room of the future – where doctors and patients have a conversation while artificial intelligence takes care of all the note-taking and clinical paperwork – closer to reality.

Sources:Annals of Family Medicine, Microsoft

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October 18, 2019 – By Tony Bitzionis