Nuance and Microsoft partner for automated health records with voice biometrics

Voice biometrics and processing provider Nuance Communications has formed a partnership with Microsoft to transform healthcare delivery with ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) technologies to power the exam room of the future, in which clinical documentation writes itself, transforming the doctor-patient experience, according to the announcement.

Nuance will contribute its Dragon Medical platform to provide healthcare-optimized speech recognition and processing with advanced conversational AI. The backend will include Microsoft Azure, Azure AI, and Project EmpowerMD Intelligent Scribe Service.

“The Microsoft partnership will accelerate our ability to solve for healthcare’s most pressing challenges — together,” comments Nuance CEO Mark Benjamin. “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.”

One of the key goals of the joint initiative is to reduce the administrative burden that contributes to burnout among physicians, who report one to two hours of after-hours work each day, mostly for administrative tasks.

“We have an incredible opportunity to use advances in cloud and AI technology to transform healthcare delivery,” states Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “Together with Nuance, we will apply the power of Azure and Azure AI to this challenge, with the aim of improving the day-to-day life of firstline healthcare workers everywhere — so they can provide better care.”

The companies will work with long-term partners providing electronic health records (EHRs) to develop the ACI, which is intended to deliver seamless interaction between clinicians and patients. Conversations with consenting patients will be synthesized and integrated with contextual data from EHRs to auto-populate the patient’s records in the system.

“Physician burnout has become one of the most important concerns facing the healthcare industry today,” says 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 new ACI technology is expected to reach an initial group of physician specialties in early 2020.

A market research report a year ago forecast the global healthcare biometrics market to reach $11.7 billion by 2024.

Article Topics

artificial intelligence  |  biometrics  |  healthcare  |  Microsoft  |  Nuance Communications  |  speech recognition  |  voice biometrics