The demand for ambient clinical voice solutions is gaining momentum and the market is quickly filling with vendors. Microsoft Nuance has been providing healthcare voice solutions for over two decades. How is the company leveraging that experience?
Healthcare IT Today caught up with Peter Durlach, Chief Strategy Officer at Microsoft Life Sciences and Health to learn more about their ambient clinical voice solution. Durlach is responsible for developing and advancing Microsoft’s healthcare strategy which includes Nuance Communications which Microsoft acquired in 2022. Durlach was an executive at Nuance for over 15 years.
Ambient Clinical Voice merges artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to capture and transcribe clinician-patient interactions. The technology allows physicians to focus entirely on their patients during encounters. Ambient Clinical Voice holds the promise of streamlining documentation, reducing physician workload, and enhancing patient care.
A Legacy of Voice Technology
In 1997, Dragon Medical, a voice recognition app, hit the market. It was the first continuous dictation product designed specifically for the healthcare industry. The current iteration of Nuance’s ambient clinical voice solution, now called the Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) Copilot solution, draws on this rich legacy of voice technology experience.
“DAX Copilot is built on our Dragon Medical franchise,” explained Durlach. “Back in 2017 we embarked on a journey to build the next generation of capabilities. The goal was to automate note taking so that physicians could go back to looking patients in the eye and have a conversation with them.”
Capabilities of Ambient Clinical Voice
Not all ambient clinical voice solutions are created equal. Some are stand-alone and require users to cut-and-paste the note generated from the physician-patient conversation into the proper back-end system, like an electronic health record (EHR). Some operate in near real-time while others require the conversations to be processed before the text is available.
Healthcare IT Today has been profiling a number of ambient clinical voice solutions (see a full list below), and comparing their capabilities across a common set of criteria, including:
- Is it real-time?
- Is it integrated with the EHR?
- Does it provide a transcript? A summary? Both?
- Can it work for specialists?
DAX Copilot checks all the boxes
DAX Copilot
DAX Copilot integrates seamlessly with various EHRs, including a deep integration with Epic. The solution stands out due to its ability to not just generate a transcript of the physician-patient conversation, but also to create highly accurate semi-structured (aka summary) notes.
“Our voice technology has been used by a majority of healthcare organizations for the past twenty years,” said Durlach. “Through those millions of encounters, across thousands of physicians, we have refined our technology to make it extremely accurate.”
DAX Copilot also have the unique ability to retrieve information from the EHR through voice commands. This is unlike many other solutions which only provide users wit the ability to input data.
“When physicians use DAX Copilot, they follow the same workflow they are used to,” added Durlach. “They don’t need to do anything different than what they do today, except they don’t have to type at a keyboard anymore. However, some physicians are finding new ways to use the technology – like dictating pre-visit notes or doing their own quick set of reminders after the patient leaves the exam room.”
Watch the interview with Peter Durlach to learn:
- What he recommends that physicians do before choosing an ambient clinical voice solution
- How DAX Copilot compares to other ambient clinical voice solutions on the market
- Why capturing an encounter is not the only task that physicians want to do with voice technology
Learn more about DAX Copilot at https://www.nuance.com/healthcare/ambient-clinical-intelligence/explore-dax-for-clinicians.html
Check out other articles on ambient clinical voice:
- Corti Becomes Part of the Conversation
- A Look at Nabla Copilot’s Automatic Clinical Documentation
- Fully Automated Medical Scribes Using AI
- Oracle Health Goes Beyond Visit Summaries with Its Use of AI in Their EHR
- Augmedix Derives More Value from Automated Generation of Medical Notes
- Real-Time Clinical Note Generation from Mutuo Health Solutions
- The Evolution of Suki’s Ambient Clinical Voice Solution and What Differentiates It in the Market
- Outsourcing Clinical Notes to an Expert-Machine Collaboration Using Ambient Clinical Voice
- Abridge Aims at Transparency, Reliability, and Credibility with Their Ambient Clinical Voice Solution
- NextGen Focusing on AI to Improve Workflows and on Street Medicine
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