A logo is seen at the corporate offices of Microsoft Corporation in the central business district of Lisbon, Portugal, on December 27, 2022.
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Microsoft speech recognition subsidiary Nuance Communications Tuesday Announce Its AI-powered clinical note-taking app is coming to Epic Systems to help reduce administrative workload for physicians.
Epic is a healthcare software company that helps hospitals and other medical systems store, share and access electronic health records. Epic’s products are used by more than 500,000 physicians and 306 million patients worldwide, and the company has long-term partnerships with both Microsoft and Nuance.
The two companies are collaborating to build a system that can perform many of the back-end administrative responsibilities of clinicians. Nuance told CNBC on Tuesday that the integration of its latest solution, Dragon Ambient eXperience Express, into Epic is a “significant step” toward that goal.
DAX Express automatically generates draft clinical notes within seconds of a patient visit. It can record the conversations between doctors and patients in real time, and combine existing artificial intelligence and OpenAI’s latest model GPT-4 to create notes.
“I think the magic is that the notes aren’t generated in an hour, they’re generated in seconds,” Garrett Adams, head of product for Epic’s mobile division, told CNBC on Tuesday. It takes longer than typing it in manually, but they can now type it better, faster, and with a level of convenience that was simply unimaginable a decade ago.”
Microsoft acquired Nuance, which sells tools for recognizing and transcribing speech during doctor visits, customer service calls and voicemails, for about $16 billion in 2021.The company first announced the DAX Express solution in March, saying In Tuesday’s release The technology saves clinicians approximately seven minutes per patient visit.
Many doctors and nurses across the United States are struggling to keep up with the heavy paperwork, so this time is a precious commodity in the healthcare industry.
A study funded by American Medical Association A 2016 study found that for every hour doctors spend caring for patients, they spend two more hours on administrative tasks. Physicians also tend to spend an extra hour or two doing paperwork outside of working hours, which many refer to as “pajama time,” the study said.
“The last thing they want to do is pajama time,” Peter Durlach, Nuance’s chief strategy officer, told CNBC in an interview Tuesday. Adams added that Nuance’s technology will also allow doctors to be more present during patient meetings.
“Providers are able to sit back and really focus on what the patient has to say without thinking about all the other things they need to keep track of deep down,” he said. “Patients feel more connected and heard.”
Nuance maintains strict data agreements with customers so patient data is fully encrypted and operates in a HIPAA compliant environment.
Epic’s DAX Express will be available to select users in a private preview this summer, and Durlach said the company hopes to expand to general availability in the first quarter of 2024.
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