Microsoft and Nuance Partner to Reduce Administrative Tasks with AI

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Microsoft and Nuance Communications yesterday announced a partnership to accelerate the delivery of ambient clinical intelligence to reduce physician burnout.

The partnership will bring together Nuance’s speech recognition and processing solutions and conversational artificial intelligence (AI) for clinical documentation and decision support with 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,” said Mark Benjamin, CEO at 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.”

Primary care providers spend two hours on administrative tasks for every hour they are with a patient, according to research published in Annals of Family Medicine.

Ambient clinical intelligence has the potential to reduce burnout by synthesizing patient-physician conversations, integrating data with contextual information from the electronic health record and auto-populating the patient’s medical record in the system.

The companies will expand on Nuance’s ambient clinical intelligence and expect to introduce the technology to a subset of physician specialties in early 2020. The technology is built on Microsoft Azure and will merge both Microsoft and Nuance’s voice biometrics, signal enhancement, ambient listening, natural language understanding, clinical intelligence and text-to-speech.

“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,” said Satya Nadella, MBA, CEO at Microsoft.

Through the partnership, Nuance will migrate most of its internal infrastructure and hosted products to Microsoft Azure.

The partnership comes a week after Blue Shield of California, Altais and Notable Health partnered to automate administrative tasks to enhance patient experience.

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