- Nuance Communications Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) and Cerner Corporation (NASDAQ: CERN) announced that they have expanded on their long-standing AI collaboration
Nuance Communications Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) and Cerner Corporation (NASDAQ: CERN) announced that they have expanded on their long-standing AI collaboration so that includes the integration of Nuance’s virtual assistant technology into the Cerner Millennium electronic health record (EHR).
Nuance is known for providing intelligent systems that support a more natural and insightful approach to clinical documentation, freeing clinicians to spend more time caring for patients. And Nuance healthcare solutions capture, improve, and communicate over 300 million patient stories each year, helping more than 550,000 clinicians in 10,000 global healthcare organizations to drive meaningful clinical and financial outcomes. And Cerner’s health technologies connect people and information systems at thousands of contracted provider facilities worldwide dedicated to creating better care for individuals and communities. And Cerner assists clinicians in making care decisions and assists organizations in managing the health of their populations.
This deal builds upon the existing integration between Nuance’s Dragon Medical platform and Cerner Millennium and joint clients will be able to utilize Nuance’s advanced natural language virtual assistant technology to navigate the EHR using just their voice thus giving clinicians more time to spend with their patients and less time with their computer.
This expanded Nuance-Cerner relationship is driven by the healthcare industry’s need to mitigate what the World Medical Association is calling a “pandemic of physician burnout” with 51% of physicians reporting frequent or constant feelings of burnout. And this is caused by a staggering administrative workload of electronic paperwork to document patient care and to meet requirements for insurance coverage, financial reimbursement, and medicolegal liability protection.
Research has shown that over 80% of physicians believe virtual assistants in health care can reduce the burden on care teams and improve the patient experience. And Nuance’s virtual assistant technology helps physicians rapidly accomplish tasks and communicate more naturally while allowing them to use specialized medical terminology across a range of devices and applications with high accuracy.
Nuance’s deeply embedded virtual assistant technology delivers sophisticated conversational dialogues and skills that automate high-value clinical tasks inside Cerner Millennium like chart search, navigation, intelligent computerized physician order entry (CPOE), and scheduling.
And Nuance technology’s high accuracy rates and rich set of voice-activated skills and ability to understand the user’s intent in context provides higher levels of workflow automation and more efficient and complete documentation of patient care. Plus Nuance’s pre-built and HIPAA-compliant natural language understanding models and cloud platform will support Cerner to deploy the solution quicker and easier to joint clients.
KEY QUOTES:
“Health systems and their care teams are facing unprecedented challenges as they strive to deliver great patient care while dealing with extreme financial pressures and a worldwide pandemic. At Cerner, we are committed to continuing to deliver leading-edge AI-powered solutions, leveraging our open platform approach, to reduce the administrative burden on care teams so they can focus on the patient. With digital transformation happening at a breakneck speed, we are excited to expand our leading AI-enabled technology offerings with Nuance to help us fulfill this mission.”
— Tanuj Gupta, vice president and physician executive, Cerner Intelligence, Cerner
“Together with Cerner, we’re bringing the next level of conversational AI directly to our joint clients with the goals of improving patient experiences, combating clinician burnout, and reducing costs. Building on our Dragon Medical platform, already used by over 550,000 physicians in the U.S. alone, our new virtual assistant technology will help deliver solutions that automate time-consuming tasks, eliminate inefficiencies, and bring clinical intelligence and better decision-support to clinicians at the point of care.”
— Joe Petro, CTO of Nuance
