Nuance and Microsoft partner to transform clinical experience

By Elly Yates-Roberts on 18 October 2019

Software provider Nuance Communications and Microsoft have partnered to transform the clinical experience for doctors and patients.

The firms aim to computerise documentation with ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) so that documentation writes itself and doctors can spend more time with their patients, while reducing burnout from working after-hours on administrative tasks.

The partnership will use technologies from both organisations. Nuance will offer its healthcare-optimised speech recognition and processing solutions such as its Dragon Medical platform; voice biometrics; and specialised ambient sensing hardware, while Microsoft Azure and Project EmpowerMD Intelligent Scribe Service will provide essential natural language understanding capabilities.

“We have an incredible opportunity to use advances in cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to transform healthcare delivery,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “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 first-line healthcare workers everywhere — so they can provide better care.”

Working with long-term electronic health record (EHR) partners to develop the technology, ACI will electronically produce patient-clinician conversations, integrate that data with contextual information from the EHR, and automatically update the patient’s medical.

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

As part of the agreement, Nuance will migrate much of its on-premises internal infrastructure and hosted products to Microsoft Azure.