Nuance Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq: NUAN), today announced significant advancements in its strategic Natural Language Processing (NLP) initiative for the healthcare industry. Expanding upon its existing technological capabilities and team of health information technology (HIT) experts, Nuance, a market leader in speech-driven clinical documentation and communication, will deliver breakthrough NLP-powered clinical documentation solutions to help analyze, structure and utilize the more than 80 percent of unstructured clinical documentation that exists in the healthcare industry today.
By empowering healthcare organizations to “unlock” unstructured clinical documentation, sometimes referred to as the “narrative blob,” Nuance’s NLP solutions will enable the extraction of clinically relevant data that would otherwise be impossible to access, unless done manually by humans. With this access, healthcare organizations will increase the amount of meaningful data that can be used for clinical decision making, leading to improved patient care and a reduction in overall healthcare costs. Furthermore, by helping collect and report on various diagnostic, quality and safety measures, Nuance will help healthcare organizations advance efforts to qualify for Meaningful Use reimbursements associated with certified electronic health record (EHR) technology, as outlined in the HITECH Act.
In addition to significant internal NLP research and development investments, Nuance has acquired key technologies and researchers from Language and Computing, Inc. (L&C), a pioneering developer of clinical narrative processing technology. Nuance has also formed a strategic partnership with Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), which will enable Nuance to incorporate MGH’s proven NLP solution, Smart Dictation, into its own solution portfolio for the healthcare market.
“Natural Language Processing adds meaning to the clinical narrative, so that clinicians’ spoken words are not simply transformed into text, but can be used to create meaningful clinical data that can be inserted into an EHR or other data repositories without forcing doctors to document via time consuming and restrictive point-and-click templates,” said John Shagoury, executive vice president for Healthcare, Nuance. “By adding these new Natural Language Processing technologies and capabilities, Nuance has advanced its commitment to improve the clinical documentation process for healthcare organizations by extending the power of our speech-driven solutions that cater to both to clinicians’ documentation preferences and provider organizations’ need to create structured data within their EHRs.”
By integrating L&C’s NLP technologies into its healthcare portfolio, Nuance will enhance its ability to address the structured data management challenges in healthcare with its award winning line of clinical documentation solutions including Dragon Medical, eScription and Dictaphone Enterprise Speech System. With these integrated technologies, Nuance will provide solutions to the healthcare market that enable advanced clinical data warehousing, clinical decision support, data mining, coding for billing and disease management. L&C’s powerful technologies include a comprehensive medical knowledge base that is specifically designed to extract clinically relevant and discrete data from unstructured medical documentation. L&C technology is currently deployed at major healthcare institutions, including Kaiser Permanente and Ochsner.
As part of Nuance’s broad partnership with MGH, Nuance will exclusively license Smart Dictation NLP, a pioneering system that was developed by the MGH Lab of Computer Science, which is currently being used by MGH physicians to automatically extract key data elements from narrative dictations and populate the EHR. Nuance will leverage key capabilities of this technology alongside its full portfolio of NLP and speech-driven clinical documentation solutions to help healthcare organizations convert unstructured text into a structured, digital and interoperable format that contains extracted data elements for a variety of applications.
To further support its mission associated with NLP development and its goal of maintaining the important clinician narrative in EHRs, Nuance has joined the Health Story Project, a collaboration of healthcare vendors, providers and associations. The Health Story Project believes clinical documentation that includes the physician narrative is crucial to facilitate the electronic exchange of comprehensive health information and should be defined as part of Meaningful Use criteria. Additionally, with this group, which holds an Associate Charter Agreement with Health Level Seven (HL7), Nuance will contribute to the development and support of the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) standards to enhance the flow of clinical information between narrative dictations and the EHR.
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CINCINNATI & NEW YORK, Mar 11, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Convergys Corporation (CVG 12.56, +0.29, +2.36%), a global leader in relationship management, announced today that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Magazine selected it as a Service Winner in the Outsourcing category.
CRM Magazine is a leading publication of the customer relationship management (CRM) industry. Recognizing how the economic climate helped drive service as a significant differentiator, CRM magazine’s annual CRM Service Awards honor the vendors, consultants, and end-user companies focused on customer experiences through the integration of people, processes, and technologies.
Citing Convergys’ excellent reputation in the marketplace, innovative roadmap, and overall value proposition, CRM announced the winners in the “2010 Service Awards” March issue — its seventh annual review of industry innovation and success.
CRM Magazine has previously recognized Convergys in the Outsourcing category in 2006, 2007, and 2008.
CRM Magazine selects its service winners based on a proprietary selection formula that includes industry analyst ratings for customer satisfaction, depth of functionality, and company direction.
“We are honored to be recognized once again by CRM Magazine as the winner in the Outsourcing category,” said Andrea Ayers, Convergys President, Customer Management. “This recognition is a testament to the strength of our dedicated contact center agents across the globe. Convergys is committed to providing a superior service experience to our clients and their customers through our agent-assisted and self-service solutions, and this award solidifies that commitment.”
“CRM Magazine is pleased to present the 2010 CRM Service Awards to those companies and individuals raising the bar in service-related customer relationship initiatives. These efforts are helping companies streamline business processes, maximize profitability, and provide more value to customers,” said David Myron, editorial director of CRM Magazine. “Congratulations to this year’s award recipients. May they continue to raise the standard of CRM excellence.”
Convergys Customer Solutions optimize everyday interactions throughout our clients’ enterprises — turning the customer experience into a strategic differentiator. As a single-source provider of self-service, agent-assisted, and proactive care, Convergys combines consulting, innovative technology, and agent-assisted services to optimize the customer experience and strengthen customer relationships. Through the provision of outsourcing services or improvements to an in-house contact center, Convergys helps its clients build more effective relationships with their customers.
About Convergys
Convergys Corporation (CVG 12.56, +0.29, +2.36%) is a global leader in relationship management. We provide solutions that drive more value from the relationships our clients have with their customers and employees. Convergys turns these everyday interactions into a source of profit and strategic advantage for our clients.
For more than 30 years, our unique combination of domain expertise, operational excellence, and innovative technologies has delivered process improvement and actionable business insight to clients that now span more than 70 countries and 35 languages.
Convergys, a Fortune Most Admired Company for nine consecutive years, has approximately 70,000 employees in 82 customer contact centers and other facilities in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and our global headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. For more information, visit www.convergys.com
(Convergys and the Convergys logo are registered trademarks of Convergys Corporation.)
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OutSystems announced the latest release of their 5.0 Agile platform last week.
Here’s the post from their blog regarding the release, its new features and some of the product details.
Give us a call to schedule a demo of the software or let us know if we can help you get a version downloaded and setup in your environment, at no cost!
From OutSystems.com:
In this version we’re taking agile a step further; not only are we supporting the entire application lifecycle management for web applications, we also added support for IT teams to rapidly develop business processes using agile methodologies.
Traditionally, business process development was done at a different pace using different tools than IT used for application development. However, one of the biggest challenges facing the business process world is the integration of business processes with applications; which meant one of them was always waiting for the other. And, in the case of our customers who already use the Agile Platform, web application development was happening faster than business processes development.
With version 5.0 of the Agile Platform, we have closed that gap! Using the new Business Process Technology capabilities of the platform, IT teams can develop business processes totally integrated with web applications in an agile manner. All artifacts that the Agile Platform provides for Web Application development – like TrueChange technology, 1 Click-Publishing, Real Time Monitoring, and so on – are also available for business process development.
To develop this new capability, the OutSystems R&D team partnered with one of our customers, Van Ameyde, to design and implement this capability. Van Ameyde uses business processes intensively for insurance claims processing and has very heavy change demands for those processes. Customer participation has been key to the development of the new 5.0 functionality, and we believe that it led to a pragmatic implementation of Business Process Technology that will allow IT teams to fulfill the needs of the business from a process perspective, as fast as they have been doing for web applications with the Agile Platform.
Along with Business Process Technology, version 5.0 includes many other improvements that will make developers a lot more productive. If you’re already using the Agile Platform, check the videos of some of the improvements we made to the platform. If you want to give it a try for yourself, the best thing to do is download the (free) Community Edition and try out the new capabilities of the platform.
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Great post from OutSystems regarding the use of Agile and Scrum in the application development of Fly.com.
The post summarizes a recent webcast from Max Rayner the CTO of TravelZoo.
Travel Zoo is travel publisher with 18 million subscribers and fly.com is an online app that helps you find the exact match to your air travel needs. During the webcast Max discussed the problem space, their agile approach, the innovative metasearch engine, how they managed a distributed team, challenges, key learnings and reasons for their success.
At the core, we are often asked about using Agile in “real world” scenarios. The thinking behind the question is likely based on the presumption that Agile works best for internal, low volume applications. Its great to see TravelZoo and Fly.com see so much success with the approach and the software tool.
The full, original post is located here.
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OutSystems recently posted the following bit regarding good sources of introductory information on Agile practices and Agile methodology. We thought you would find useful:
In no particular order:
- Jutta Eckstein’s book – Agile Development in the Large
- Mitch Lacey & Associates – for their Blog + PDF Decks
- Juergen Appelo’s blog “Noop.nl“
- James Shore’s Blog “The Art of Agile“
- Google Tech Talks: Elisabeth Hendrickson on Agile Testing
- Craig Larman’s book “Agile & Iterative Development“
- Dan North’s Blog “Introducing BDD“
- James Bach’s resources (blog, book, pdf & articles) on Exploratory Testing
- Last but not least, Rodrigo Coutinho’s video on “The Secret of Agile Speed”
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OutSystems, a provider of agile software development tools, announces a new, free Agile Platform Community Edition of its solution to give developers an easy way to create Web business applications and use agile techniques without any vendor lock-in.OutSystems, a provider of agile software development tools, has announced a new, free Agile Platform Community Edition of its solution to give developers an easy way to create Web business applications and use agile techniques without any vendor lock-in, the company said.
OutSystems said its Agile Platform Community Edition is a full version of the company’s Agile Platform that can be deployed into production for personal use or by small businesses with up to five concurrent end users. OutSystems announced its new release at the Agile 2009 Conference in Chicago on Aug. 24.
“The Agile Platform offers developers an end-to-end solution for the delivery of Web business applications that overcomes the development, delivery and change issues faced by enterprise IT shops when trying to apply agile methods,” said Mike Jones, vice president of marketing at OutSystems. “We anticipate that the Community Edition will lead to a grass roots growth in loyal users of the Agile Platform and eventually new customers.”
OutSystems’ Agile Platform is a unified solution, based on agile methodologies, that addresses the full life cycle of delivering and managing Web applications. It can be used to integrate existing systems, compose and automatically deploy new applications, manage them centrally and drive change during their entire life cycle, the company said.
The new Community Edition provides a small download footprint, a simple installation process, a getting started guide and sample applications. OutSystems also is making available a series of getting started tutorials to explore the Agile Platform’s capabilities for delivering rich Internet applications.
“OutSystems makes agile much easier, but it is important for developers to play around with the platform and discover it for themselves,” said Stefan Meier, associate director of software development at XDx, in a statement. “The Agile Platform Community Edition provides this opportunity, and we can’t wait for more developers to try it and build awareness of how software/IT staff and their business customers can benefit together from the improved communication process, time-savings and cost-effectiveness provided by the Agile Platform.”
In a blog post that supports the OutSystems strategy in releasing its Community Edition, Forrester Research analyst John Rymer said:
“Developers consistently tell us they want unrestricted platform downloads—no time bombs, no forced contacts with the vendor’s sales staff, no limited-function versions. … We thought in this era of open source, everyone understood this point about developer downloads. Downloads are a great way to encourage developers to learn your product’s ins, outs, values, and issues. But developers learn at their own pace, not on your schedule. Developers need your whole product because they will follow a variety of paths to knowledge, not just the paths that make sense to you. And developers don’t want to listen to a sales rep’s pitch on the wonders of your software. Let your code do the convincing instead.”
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OutSystems®, provider of the industry-leading Agile Platform, today announced that leading analyst firm Butler Group recently released a new Technology Audit report that highly recommends OutSystems’ Agile Platform (OAP) for companies across industries seeking versatility and fast turn-around, especially when faced with rapidly changing business requirements or long project backlogs and limited in-house resources.
Butler Group’s Technology Audit on OutSystems concluded, “Butler Group believes that most businesses can benefit from using OAP in their IT development projects. When coupled with the suitability of the tool within an Agile way of development, this makes the offering from OutSystems a persuasive proposition.”
Butler Group highlighted the Agile Platform’s ability to considerably reduce the problem of bridging the IT and business cultural divides since “the degree of automation in OAP raises the level of business-aware personnel who can be trained to use the system and develop applications far closer to the heart of business requirements than with traditional software development teams.”
Butler Group also agrees with the OutSystems claim “that most significant benefits will be realised in the form of reduced application maintenance costs.”
Butler Group also wrote that the Agile Platform’s ability to target either .NET or Java from one single application is attractive to businesses with heterogeneous environments, creating the flexibility and freedom for specialized business logic or components deployment that doesn’t restrict organizations by the automated system.
Click below to download the complete PDF.
butlergroup-outsystems-agileplatform42-ta001682adt
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A study conducted by Atos Origin measuring the productivity of OutSystems’ Agile Platform shows that OutSystems is 22% cheaper for Agile software development. With 
OutSystems, the study delivered equal levels of quality in a shorter time period even with an increased workload.
The original blog post was in dutch but lots of request came from other languages to translate this blog, that is why the original blog by Hans ten Berge is translated here.
This study measured the productivity of a project executed by Atos Origin for one of its customers using OutSystems’ Agile Platform against the productivity of other Agile projects at Atos Origin; non-agile projects implemented in 4GL languages; as well as projects in a global Quantitative Software Management (QSM) database.
This is a great article for anyone interested in the efficiencies of Agile and the differentiation within.
Click here to read the full article.
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June 15, 2009 — The notion of agile development by now is well known for most every responsible CEO and CIO. With the economy stuck in low gear, organizations need to find ways to shorten development cycles and improve quality, all with the resources they already have on hand.
The Agile Manifesto, which spells out the ideas and practices for its implementation, was written in 2001, and in the eight ensuing years, many organizations have taken the first steps toward agile development. By now, many have had successful projects done by designated agile teams and have realized the cost savings and time-to-market benefits that agile espouses.
Now, these organizations want to reap bigger benefits by bringing agile out of its silos and into a wide deployment, across geographical locations, time zones and language barriers. Yet among the Manifesto’s 12 core principles are that “the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation,” and “business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.” And there’s the one about “individuals and interactions over processes and tools.”
Those principles would almost seem to inhibit the adoption of agile processes in a large, distributed development organization. So how do organizations scale their agile practices to get a bigger payback?
Not to scale?
Robert Holler, CEO of agile project management software maker VersionOne, took a step back to answer that question. “There are challenges with scale. The problem’s not unique to agile or to software development,” he said. “Scaling is just tough. Sometimes agile gets a black eye for not scaling, but it’s more like, ‘Development doesn’t scale.’”
And Paul Hodgetts, lead consultant at Agile Logic, said that planning before embarking down the agile path is critical.
“There’s no way to get a big organization behind something like this without first thinking it through,” he said. “‘Why are we doing this? How will we get everyone on board?’ You must show them a way to get from point A to point B that won’t make their lives miserable for the next 12–18 months.”
Too often, he said, organizations fail and blame it on the methodology. “They say, ‘We tried to implement agile, but we didn’t plan or learn about it, so it didn’t work, so agile sucks.’”
Holler agreed that the foundation for agile must be built before adoption can be successful. Among the factors organizations need to assess are whether the educational base to scale already exists. If the answer is no, the organization must decide if it is willing to bring in the expertise. “If not, it’s an impediment,” he said.
“People say, ‘We want to scale but we don’t want to invest’ in education. That won’t work. [Education] is a fundamental tenet of success.”
Another fundamental issue for enterprise-wide agile development is buy-in. If you can’t get everyone in the organization to agree with the approach, success will be impossible to achieve, said Hodgetts.
“Agile is hard and it takes a lot of commitment,” he said. “Every enterprise implementation I’ve seen is a roller-coaster ride. They implement it in one team, see some productivity improvements, better quality software, and then that the people are happy. But when they try to bring it wider, they stir things up—maybe they move people off the successful teams to coach newer people—and they might actually lose productivity for a time.
“As an enterprise, you’ve got to be prepared to live through a number of cycles like that.”
In practical terms, though, scaling across a large, distributed organization poses several challenges. The tried-and-true methods of developing in pairs in the same room, and using a whiteboard at daily standup meetings, or even having those meetings, don’t carry over to teams that are geographically dispersed and working on an around-the-world, 24-hour schedule.
Enter the tools
The original 17 signers of the Agile Manifesto were mostly consultants and developers; as a result, the notion of small, co-located teams doing pair programming and constantly engaging the customer were top of mind. To go with this, a number of excellent point solutions were created for continuous integration, for functional and acceptance testing, and for managing change.
But these solutions optimize parts that can be leveraged by small teams, leaving organizations to do a lot of toolsmithing to integrate the pieces into an enterprise-scale solution, according to Scott Ambler, the practice leader for agile development at IBM.
“The overarching platform has to provide value for developers, or they won’t use it,” he said. “Continuous integration is great. Testing is great. But they’re having to do a lot of toolsmithing to make it work.”
On a management level, automated metrics offer tremendous value, he said. “Manual metrics is a lot of wasted effort. You need a coherent metrics program in place or you’ll have problems adopting agile in a meaningful way.”
IBM’s Rational Team Concert provides an integrated tool set for the agile life cycle, Ambler said. Rational Requirements Composer offers lightweight agile modeling; Quality Manager tackles usability and security issues while managing parallel testing efforts; AppScan—though not yet based on IBM’s Jazz technology—offers security testing for Web-based applications; and Software Analyzer is a static code analyzer that keeps agilists more focused on quality.
Ambler acknowledged there are “some great open-source tools” out there, but at the end of the day, “we see team after team spending so much time on integration. They should be developing applications for their own organization. Doing all this toolsmithing is not a great use of their time.”
Tools should not lock a user into a particular discipline, cautioned Ryan Martens, founder of agile project management software provider Rally Software. “It’s more about picking a partner that keeps you on the path” toward a mature agile process, he said. “Otherwise, you end up with a heavy process that’s not well lined up with agility.”
Rally’s software, simply called Rally, focuses on project planning and management, Martens said. The software integrates with development tools for Eclipse, .NET, scripting and embedded projects, he pointed out, and also lets organizations assess their agile prowess and bring in elements of coaching and training. “There are a lot of choices available at the development tool level. We don’t provide tools for individuals. Those pieces get integrated with our products,” he said.
Borland Software, which is the target of an acquisition by Micro Focus, transformed its in-house development to agile at the end of 2006. The company has development centers in Austria, Australia, Singapore and Santa Ana, Calif. To achieve its goal, the company created Borland TeamFocus, an electronic team board that enables project management.
“We built out team rooms and use projectors for virtual corkboards,” said Chuck Maples, senior vice president of research and development at Borland. “You can click on the corkboard and create tasks, and then drill into those tasks. It was all designed with an enterprise agile model in mind. It’s been very successful for us. We’ve improved quality, shortened our release cycles and increased the predictability to the business.”
VersionOne is also focused on project planning and management with its V1 software, and it now has Java and .NET SDKs to allow integrations with organizations using those technologies. In late May, the company announced V1 will include IdeaSpace, modeled after Salesforce.com’s IdeaExchange, for high-volume tactical planning, prioritization and collaboration, VersionOne’s Holler explained. “There’s nothing like an economic downturn to deliver some new functionality,” he quipped.
IdeaSpace, written by VersionOne to tightly tie in to its agile platform, is a place for the business side and developers to write stories and get feedback from customers. It supports multiple forums, with security, and lets managers see who’s generating the most requests and who’s responding the most, as well as other information for use in the planning cycle, Holler said.
OutSystems offers agile platforms for an on-premises development, delivery and operations management environment, and Agile Network as software-as-a-service for managing agile projects, including training and forums. Among the important features of the software is a sizing and scoping tool that leverages user stories to define the scope of a project, so an accurate budget can be generated, according to Mike Jones, vice president of marketing for OutSystems, which has more than half of its customers making changes to and building custom packages for SAP environments.
One of the keys to the OutSystems platform is the “true change engine” built into the platform’s model-based repository environment, which enables users to understand the impact of a change to the code and provides self-healing impact analysis; it either fixes a problem or reports on it. Further, Agile Network provides a place for end users to insert comments alongside a running application, and developers can launch the code underneath that submission screen to make the change, Jones briefly explained.
“End-user acceptance flies through because it’s been so vetted by that point,” he added.
To scale for the enterprise, Jones said OutSystems found it had to break some Scrum-type roles to leverage remote resources. “We split the traditional role of Scrum Master into an engagement manager, who’s always with the customer, understanding the feedback, setting expectations and leading the demo at the end of every sprint; and a delivery manager, who is where the development team is and who owns the architecture, the application, and who’s responsible to set the scope and deadlines,” he said. “The two managers work together to facilitate collaboration between the in-house and remote resources.”
Respecting the process
Even with tooling, Agile Logic’s Hodgetts said the agile advocates within large organizations get that it requires a change in their approach to development. “You can’t just purchase agile and install it and be done with it,” he said. “You can’t just buy VersionOne and say, ‘I’m agile,’ or hire Paul [Hodgetts] for three training sessions and say, ‘Now I’m agile.’”
There are some common themes that most agree are the first steps down the road to agile development: running in shorter cycles, higher visibility, and worker collaboration. “Getting those cores in place are critical to success,” Hodgetts said.
The question of scaling agile for enterprise-wide development is no longer a question, according to Rally’s Martens. “The question now is, how good do you want to be, by when, and who’s the best partner to get you there?”
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Company looks to bridge gap between IT and rest of the business
by Heather Caliendo
The Journal Record June 15, 2009 – read the full article here
TULSA – Within many businesses, a divide exists between the information technology department and the rest of the business.
“There is a fundamental distrust,” said John Marino, president of Waterfield Technologies. “Sometimes it is that classic stereotype where businesses hate IT and think they’re just dorks.”
Tulsa-based Waterfield Technologies is a software solutions provider under the Waterfield Group. Waterfield provides a broad range of financial services.
Marino said Waterfield Technologies’ clients span several different industries across the country. The company offers consulting, technology deployment and business process optimization to help organizations address and solve key business challenges.
“We are trying to push solutions that are allowing businesses to become better at what they do and extend what they are doing,” he said.
One significant problem Marino said his company observes is when the majority of a business’s departments and the IT branch don’t communicate.
“Fundamentally the business just wants to do their day job, and IT just wants to do their day job – but you have to work together,” he said. “We feel the communication process just naturally breaks down.”
Marino said he hopes their new partnership with OutSystems will help bridge the gap between IT and the other departments within a business.
OutSystems provides the Agile Platform, which is the first unified solution based on Agile methodologies. This methodology is an approach to project management typically used in software development.
While there are several highly technical aspects to Agile methodology, Marino said the premise is a philosophy shift on how companies build solutions.
Companies use the Agile Platform to enhance productivity, cost-efficiencies and overall business alignment.
The Agile Platform equips IT personnel with tools to manage business applications.
“This fosters communications between the business and IT unit so you are finding problems faster and fixing problems as they occur,” he said. “This helps give the business a solution that really meets the needs.”
Marino said he believes the Agile way will benefit Waterfield customers.
“We are really trying to solve a traditional problem between business and IT,” he said. “I really think if you poll the big companies in Tulsa and OKC, they will say IT is a necessary evil and our story is that it doesn’t have to be.”
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