A Microsoft sign at a Microsoft office in the Central Business District of Lisbon, Portugal, December 27, 2022.
Zed Jameson Bloomberg | Getty Images
Nuance Communications, Microsoft’s speech recognition subsidiary, announced Tuesday that its artificial intelligence-powered clinical notes application will be brought to Epic Systems to ease the administrative workload of physicians.
Epic is a healthcare software company that helps hospitals and other healthcare systems store, share and access electronic medical records. Worldwide, he has over half a million doctors and his 306 million patients using Epic’s products, and the company has long-term partnerships with both his Microsoft and Nuance.
The two companies are working together to build a system that can perform many of the clinician’s back-end administrative responsibilities. Nuance told CNBC on Tuesday that the integration of its latest solution, Dragon Ambient eXperience Express, into Epic is a “big step” toward that goal.
DAX Express automatically generates draft clinical notes within seconds of a patient’s visit. Combining existing AI with OpenAI’s latest model “GPT-4”, it is possible to record conversations between doctors and patients in real time and create notes.
“I think the magic here is that the notes are created in seconds instead of an hour,” Garrett Adams, product lead for Epic’s walker division, told CNBC in an interview Tuesday. told to “So it would have taken me even longer to type manually, but now I can type better and faster with a level of convenience that was unimaginable 10 years ago. .”
Nuance, acquired by Microsoft for about $16 billion in 2021, sells tools for recognizing and transcribing speech during doctor visits, customer service calls and voicemails. The company first unveiled its DAX Express solution in March, and said in a Tuesday release that the technology will save clinicians about seven minutes per visit with a patient.
Many doctors and nurses across the United States are busy with tedious paperwork, making this time valuable for the healthcare industry.
A 2016 study funded by the American Medical Association found that for every hour doctors spent examining patients, they spent an additional two hours on administrative tasks. Physicians tend to spend an additional hour or two outside of work hours on what many call “pajama time,” according to the study.
“The last thing they want to do is pajama time,” Nuance Chief Strategy Officer Peter Darlach told CNBC in an interview Tuesday. Adams added that Nuance’s technology will also increase the presence of doctors when they meet with patients.
“Health care providers can sit back and focus on their patients without thinking about other things they need to keep in the back of their minds,” he said. “Patients feel more connected and more heard.”
Nuance has strict data agreements with its customers, so patient data is fully encrypted and runs in a HIPAA compliant environment.
DAX Express for Epic will be available in private preview for select users this summer, and Durlach hopes to expand to general availability in the first quarter of 2024.
