Nuance Rolls Out Two New Clinical Language Understanding Solutions

Nuance Communications today unveiled two clinical language understanding (CLU)-powered solutions, Dragon Medical 360 | M.D.Assist and Dragon Medical 360 | QualityAnalytics.

The new language understanding solutions are designed to assist healthcare organizations battling the pressures of converting to electronic healthcare records and working with "big data"—the ability to collect, process, interpret, and then use information, the company said.

An extension of Nuance's voice-driven clinical documentation workflow, M.D.Assist and QualityAnalytics will empower healthcare organizations to capture a complete and accurate patient story through advanced voice technologies, as well as transform and leverage what has been captured with CLU in ways that have never before been possible, according to Nuance.

"The opportunity to extract value from clinical information is enormous; it's a challenge we've evolved our healthcare IT portfolio to take on," said Janet Dillione, executive vice president and general manager of Nuance Healthcare, in a statement. "Advanced voice and language understanding solutions make possible the capture of the complete patient story and enable unprecedented access and interaction with the data that has been captured. Through the use of CLU-powered solutions, healthcare organizations can process clinical information and assign meaning to it for use within other healthcare IT platforms and across the healthcare ecosystem."

Dragon Medical 360 | M.D.Assist was jointly developed with 3M Health Information Systems. M.D.Assist helps healthcare organizations improve clinical efficiency, drive appropriate reimbursement, and optimize coding workflow. It also monitors physician documentation, automatically detecting missing information and, when necessary, interactively prompting physicians for additional detail to ensure what is ultimately documented complies with electronic healthcare record coding standards.

Dragon Medical 360 | QualityAnalytics identifies key clinical and quality indicators from large volumes of narrative clinical data. With on-demand searching and analytics capabilities, healthcare organizations can identify quality measures, patients at risk for readmission, and supporting documentation, and can leverage data to address concerns while patients are still being treated.

Nuance is also pushing efforts to make the mobilization of care and, more specifically, electronic health records, a reality through intuitive voice recognition technology. The company recently hosted its first-ever Mobile Clinician Voice Challenge. The winners of this competition will be chosen based on the most innovative uses of voice recognition for the mobile clinician and will be announced later this week.

Nuance today also announced that 18 healthcare facilities have recently signed on tol use clinical speech recognition solutions from Nuance Transcription Services. Among the participating facilities are Banner Health, Carle Foundation Hospital and Physician Group, Carolinas Healthcare System, Catholic Health Partners, Providence Health Plans, St. Francis Hospital and Health Centers, Samaritan Health Services, and UCSF Medical Center.

Nuance Transcription Services is part of the company's healthcare portfolio of voice and clinical language understanding solutions used by 450,000 healthcare providers at more than 10,000 facilities.