London, UK – Building on its long history of powering virtual assistants for many of the leading consumer and automotive brands in the world, including American Airlines, Amtrak, Audi, Barclay’s, BMW, Citi, Delta, Domino’s, FedEx, Ford, and GM, Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) today unveiled its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual assistant solution designed specifically for healthcare providers.

Leveraging its extensive experience in healthcare, Nuance’s new Dragon Medical Virtual Assistant will further streamline a wide variety of clinical workflows for the 500,000 clinicians that already rely on Dragon Medical every day for their clinical documentation. Based upon the award-winning Nuance Virtual Assistant platform, the Dragon Medical Virtual Assistant will deliver sophisticated conversational dialogues and pre-built capabilities that automate high-value clinical workflows. This solution directly addresses the belief by 80% of 10,000 U.S. clinicians surveyed by Nuance that virtual assistants would drastically change healthcare by the end of 2018.

Designed for Healthcare Providers
Building on decades of experience working with healthcare providers, an extensive market footprint, and its highly scalable, multi-channel Virtual Assistant platform, Nuance has created a virtual assistant solution optimized for the healthcare provider market that includes:

• Industry-leading voice recognition technology designed for healthcare: Dragon Medical is trusted by more than 500,000 clinicians to accurately create and communicate more than 300 million patient stories a year. This cloud-based offering enables any individual, using specialized medical terminology, to communicate naturally with high accuracy and no voice training across a range of devices and applications.
• Voice biometrics and text-to-speech: The solution utilizes Nuance’s award-winning voice biometrics and text-to-speech capabilities for advanced security and clinician usability.
• Unparalleled integrations and strategic healthcare IT relationships: The offering contains embedded, unique and sophisticated workflow capabilities across major electronic health record (EHR) systems that clinicians use every day across mobile, web, and desktop platforms.
• Prototype smart speaker customized for healthcare provider settings and use cases: A prototype, specialized healthcare smart speaker connects to the Dragon Medical cloud and is optimized for clinical interactions and ambient speech clinical workflows.
• Secure and reliable platform: The solution leverages the HITRUST CSF certified Microsoft Azure cloud hosting platform to deliver the enhanced performance, security, and privacy today’s providers require.

“Technology needs to be unobtrusive and support the process of providing high quality patient care—not get in the way,” said David Y. Ting, MD, CMIO, Massachusetts General Physicians Organization. “Having Nuance’s AI-powered virtual assistant technology embedded into the EHR will help make a new generation of patient care a reality – for both clinicians and patients.”

Enhancing Both Clinician and Patient Experience

According to new research from experts at the University of Wisconsin and the American Medical Association, primary care physicians spend more than half of their workday at a computer screen performing data entry and other tasks with EHRs. This new virtual assistant will utilize Nuance’s proven conversational AI capabilities to optimize the experience healthcare providers have with their EHRs, freeing clinicians to focus on the patient and thereby providing higher quality care, a better patient experience and lowering physician burnout.

As expectations for the care experience are rising, and with clinician scorecards, public reporting of quality measures and patient satisfaction playing a bigger role in provider success and reimbursement, healthcare organizations cannot ignore what matters most to patients. According to Nuance’s Art of Medicine survey conducted in 2015, elements of a visit that are most important to patients are time for discussion, advice and recommendations, privacy and engagement. Yet 40% of patients feel rushed during their visit and physicians have less quality time to spend with them – about 8 minutes on average per patient, or 12% of their time.

However, technology can help. The survey stated that 97% of patients are comfortable with the amount of technology being used by their providers, so long as it plays a supporting role and does not distract or interfere with their conversation time with their clinicians. With Nuance’s virtual assistant capabilities and smart speaker innovation, conversational AI will not get in the way, but will help improve clinician productivity and overcome the pain associated with conforming to existing technology interfaces – providing clinicians and patients with a new level of freedom.

“Nuance is helping to create a world where clinicians can refocus on their patients without technology getting in the way,” said Peter Durlach, senior vice president of strategy, Healthcare Division, Nuance. “Our healthcare virtual assistant and smart speaker innovations are designed to enable the clinician to get back to why they went to medical school – to take care of people. By spending more time with patients, the quality of care will increase, patients will be more satisfied with their experience and clinicians will be less burnt out.”

• Watch this video – Discover how this new virtual assistant and prototype smart speaker designed for healthcare delivers a better clinical experience.
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Nuance provides a more natural and insightful approach to clinical documentation, freeing clinicians to spend more time caring for patients. Nuance healthcare solutions capture and communicate more than 300 million patient stories each year helping more than 500,000 clinicians in 10,000 healthcare organizations globally. Nuance’s award-winning clinical speech recognition, medical transcription, CDI, coding, quality and medical imaging solutions provide a more complete and accurate view of patient care, which drives meaningful clinical and financial outcomes.

About the Nuance Virtual Assistant Platform

Nuance has been a leader in conversational AI for nearly 20 years, with speech and virtual assistant solutions across consumer, automotive and vertical enterprise markets. The Nuance Virtual Assistant Platform is recognized as the leading platform for enterprises and consumer product companies to implement solutions that are highly tuned to their specific industry and company knowledge. Nuance Nina is based on the Nuance Virtual Assistant Platform, and in October 2012 became the first virtual assistant for mobile customer service, enabling leading brands to VA-enable their app. Nina has since become the leading virtual assistant for customer engagement across all channels – Web, mobile, messaging, IoT, IVR and more. The Nuance Virtual Assistant Platform recently was named the #1 virtual assistant by both Opus Research and Forrester Research, outpacing IBM Watson, IPSoft, NextIT and others.

About Nuance Communications, Inc.

Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) is a leading provider of voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with devices and systems. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance’s proven applications. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.

Trademark reference: Nuance and the Nuance logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners.