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Mark for Microsoft Corp. At the company’s office in the central business district of Lisbon, Portugal, December 27, 2022.
Zed Jameson | bloomberg | Getty Images
Nuance Communications, the Microsoft speech-recognition subsidiary, on Tuesday announce An AI-powered clinical feedback app is coming to Epic Systems to help reduce physicians’ administrative workloads.
Epic is a healthcare software company that helps hospitals and other health systems store, share, and access electronic health records. More than 500,000 physicians and 306 million patients worldwide use Epic’s offerings, and the company has long-standing partnerships with both Microsoft and Nuance.
Companies are collaborating to build a system that can carry out many of the doctors’ back-office administrative responsibilities. Nuance told CNBC on Tuesday that integrating its newest solution, Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) Express, into Epic is a “major step” toward that goal.
DAX Express automatically creates a draft Clinical Note within seconds after a patient visit. It can record a conversation between a doctor and a patient in real time and generate a note using a combination of existing AI and OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4.
“I think the magical thing here is that this note was not produced in an hour, but in a matter of seconds,” Garrett Adams, head of product for Epic’s mobile division, told CNBC in an interview Tuesday. “While it would have taken much longer than that to write it by hand, now they’re getting it better, faster, and at a level of convenience that was really unimaginable a decade ago.”
Nuance, which Microsoft acquired for about $16 billion in 2021, sells tools to recognize and transcribe speech during doctor’s office visits, customer service calls, and voicemails. The company first announced the DAX Express solution in March, it said In a statement released Tuesday The technology saves doctors about 7 minutes per patient.
Many doctors and nurses across the United States struggle to keep up with grueling clerical work, so time is a precious commodity in the health care industry.
Study funded by American Medical Association In 2016, doctors found that for every hour a doctor spends with a patient, doctors spend an additional two hours on administrative tasks. Doctors also tend to spend an extra hour to two hours doing clerical work outside of office hours, the study said, in what many refer to as “pajama time.”
“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 when they meet with patients.
“The provider is able to sit back and really focus on what the patient is saying, without thinking about all the other things in the back of their mind that they need to keep track of,” he said. “The patient feels more connected, listened to more often.”
Nuance has strict data agreements with its customers, so all patient data is encrypted and runs in HIPAA-compliant environments.
DAX Express for Epic will be available in a private preview capacity for select users this summer, and Durlach said the company hopes to expand to general availability in the first quarter of 2024.
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