Microsoft has signed an agreement with AI-based services provider Nuance Communications to accelerate the delivery of ambient technologies in hospital examination rooms. The aim is to combine Nuance’s healthcare-optimised speech recognition and processing software, such as its Dragon Medical platform, with Microsoft Azure, Azure AI and Project EmpowerMD Intelligent Scribe Service to help physicians spend less time on administrative tasks and reduce soaring levels of doctor burnout.
Working together with long-term electronic health record (EHR) partners to develop the technology, Microsoft and Nuance said so-called ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) will power the exam room of the future where clinical documentation writes itself. Through patient consent, ACI will synthesise patient-clinician conversations, integrate that data with contextual information from the EHR, and auto-populate the patient’s medical record in the system, said the partners.
As part of the agreement, Nuance will migrate the majority of its current on-premises internal infrastructure and hosted products to Microsoft Azure. The conversational AI solutions include ambient listening, wake-up word, voice biometrics, signal enhancement, document summarisation, natural language understanding, clinical intelligence and text-to-speech.
