Microsoft Corp. Mark at the corporate’s office within the central business district of Lisbon, Portugal, December 27, 2022.
Zed Jameson | Bloomberg | Getty’s paintings
On Tuesday, Microsoft’s speech recognition subsidiary Nuance Communications announced its AI-powered clinical note application goes to Epic Systems to help reduce physician administrative burdens.
Epic is a healthcare software company that helps hospitals and other healthcare systems store, share and access electronic health records. Greater than 500,000 physicians and 306 million patients worldwide profit from Epic, and the corporate has a long-standing partnership with each Microsoft and Nuance.
The businesses are collaborating to construct a system that may perform many back office administrative tasks for physicians. Nuance told CNBC on Tuesday that the combination of its latest development, Dragon Ambient eXperience Express, with Epic is a “big step” towards that goal.
DAX Express mechanically generates a draft clinical note inside seconds of a patient visit. It will probably record doctor-patient conversation in real time and create notes using a mix of existing AI and the newest OpenAI model, GPT-4.
“I feel the magical thing is that the note is produced not in an hour, but in seconds,” Garrett Adams, product lead for Epic’s outpatient department, told CNBC on Tuesday. “So while it could have taken them so much longer to type it in by hand, they now do it higher, faster and with a level of convenience that you simply couldn’t even imagine ten years ago.”
Nuance, which Microsoft acquired for about $16 billion in 2021, sells speech recognition and transcription tools for doctor appointments, customer support calls, and voicemail. The corporate first announced its DAX Express solution in March and said released on Tuesday that the technology saves clinicians roughly seven minutes per patient meeting.
Many doctors and nurses across america struggle to sustain with strenuous paperwork, so this time is a useful commodity within the healthcare industry.
Research funded by American Medical Association in 2016 found that for each hour a health care provider spent with a patient, doctors spent a further two hours on administrative tasks. The study found that doctors typically spend a further one to two hours in paperwork outside of office hours, which many refer to as “pajama time.”
“The final thing they need to do is pajama time,” Peter Durlach, chief strategy officer at Nuance, told CNBC on Tuesday. Adams added that Nuance’s technology will even allow physicians to be more present when meeting patients.
“The provider is ready to sit back and really concentrate on what the patient is saying without fascinated about all the opposite things behind their head that they’ve to follow,” he said. “The patient feels far more connected, far more listened to.”
Nuance has strict data agreements with its customers, so patient data is fully encrypted and operates in HIPAA compliant environments.
DAX Express for Epic shall be available in private preview for select users this summer, and Durlach said the corporate hopes to expand to general availability in Q1 2024.