Nuance Provides DAX Coverage for Alaskan Healthcare Consortium

The SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium (SEARHC) is partnering with Nuance Communications in an effort to increase patient throughput for its physicians. In that regard, the Consortium will be using Nuance’s Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) to help doctors generate accurate clinical records with simple speech recognition.

Nuance DAX is able to record a conversation between a doctor and a patient (with that patient’s consent), and can use contextual information to fill in forms during the appointment itself. In doing so, it minimizes the amount of paperwork that needs to be done later, which in turn lets doctors devote more of their time to actual medical care.

SEARHC has already deployed Nuance DAX at clinics in Juneau and Sitka, and indicated that the solution will allow its physicians to see as many as 14 patients (the current average is 10) on a daily basis. The rollout will begin with family medicine, though DAX coverage will eventually be extended to psychiatry and other specialities.

SEARHC itself is a Native-run healthcare system that services 27 communities in Southeast Alaska. It is one of the oldest and largest institutions of its kind in the United States, and is hoping that Nuance DAX will help streamline its operations ahead of the construction of a new 25-bed hospital facility in Sitka.

“Nuance DAX empowers our providers to focus on patients instead of paperwork while helping us expand care access for the communities we serve,” said SEARHC Primary Care Clinics Medical Director Cate Buley. “Physician satisfaction has been very high, including one doctor who reversed plans to switch to part-time work after using DAX, and another who called it ‘the best thing that’s ever happened’ for its practical benefits in everyday clinical use.”

Nuance DAX can be used to record both in-person and virtual appointments. Several healthcare systems have adopted the solution in the past few months, including Providence, Augusta University Health, and the Rush University Medical Center.

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June 10, 2021 – by Eric Weiss