Nuance Brings Virtual Assistant to Cerner Corporation Partnership

Nuance Communications has expanded the scope of its partnership with Cerner Corporation. The latter is already using Nuance’s Dragon Medical Platform in its Cerner Millennium electronic health record solution, and will now be integrating Nuance’s virtual assistant technology to provide voice utility to its customers.

The arrangement will allow doctors to navigate the Cerner Millennium platform with simple voice commands. The two companies are hoping to reduce the prevalence of clinical burnout, with Nuance noting that 51 percent of physicians experience feelings of burnout due to their workload and the vast amounts of paperwork they need to complete as part of their practice.

Nuance’s virtual assistant will automate some of those processes, including record generation. As a result, doctors will be able to spend more time with their patients and less time sifting through charts and filling out new paperwork.   

“Health systems are facing unprecedented challenges as they strive to deliver patient care while dealing with extreme financial pressures and a worldwide pandemic,” said Cerner VP and Physician Executive Tanuj Gupta.

“We’re bringing conversational AI to our joint clients with the goals of improving patient experiences, combating clinician burnout, and reducing costs,” added Nuance CTO Joe Petro. “Our virtual assistant technology will automate time-consuming tasks, eliminate inefficiencies, and bring better decision-support to clinicians at the point of care.”

The virtual assistant will be rolled out for select Cerner and Nuance clients later in the year. Nuance’s conversational AI technology is able to discern the context of a complex medical discussion, and is compliant with HIPAA’s strict privacy requirements.

This is not the first time that Nuance has addressed clinical burnout in the past few months. In February, the company released a new Ambient Clinical Intelligence platform to automate record keeping practices, and then partnered with the American Medical Association to pilot new solutions that are able to leverage that technology.

Nuance has also teamed up with Wolters Kluwer to bring voice capabilities to the UptoDate platform and make it easier to execute searches in a clinical setting.

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July 31, 2020 – by Eric Weiss