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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From Speech Technology Magazine, click here for the original article.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) of New York City today launched an automated version of Trip Planner Voice in conjunction with Nuance Communications, Aspect—an unified communications software and consulting firm—and Trapeze Group, a transportation solutions provider.
Trip Planner is a 24/7 itinerary service aimed at New York City residents that lets users plan routes over public transport within any two municipally located points. The service was first launched as an online service three years ago and grew to include a telephone version, Trip Planner Voice, which began beta-testing in September of 2008.
By April of 2009, an average of 18,045 customers used Trip Planner daily, an increase of 172% over 2008’s 6,640 daily average. The call center version in particular, Travel Information Center, has received an average of 4,560 calls daily. These calls will now be fielded by an automated system with speech recognition powered by Nuance. The routes themselves will be mapped by Trapeze and linked with the speech components by Aspect.
Users will be able to get results by making their way through a series of prompts that allow them to set points of interest, intersections, or subway/bus stops as their beginning and end points. Once that has been entered, they are read back directions by the system through a combination of live recording and text-to-speech (which handles the name of streets). Should users have trouble with the automated system, they will be automatically routed to a live agent for additional assistance.
According to a prepared statement, today’s release represents both an effort to reduce call time and dependence on agents (and thereby costs) and to increase convenience for callers.
From a speech recognition perspective, one of the biggest challenges facing the project was the sheer number of street names in New York City. They city is home to tens of thousands of different streets, points of interest, and hundreds of bus and subway stations—all of which had entries that posed specific challenges for accurate speech recognition.
“Often there are many subway stations with the same name,” says Bobbi Manian, senior project manager for Nuance in its professional services division. “If a person said they wanted to plan a route and that they were starting at 14th Street, but they didn’t say ‘14th Street, Union Square’ they just said ‘14th Street,’ we had the intelligence to recognize that, but the back end database didn’t know what to do with that because it could have been 14th Street and Seventh Avenue, or Eight Avenue—so we made enhancements to say Which one do you want?”
Manian also points to difficulties with pronunciation. Houston Street, famously pronounced by most New Yorkers as “House-ton Street” is sometimes pronounced as if it were the Texan metropolis. Hoyt–Schermerhorn, an intersection and train stop in Brooklyn similarly has at least three different widely accepted pronunciations.
To deal with such complications, Nuance had to build its voice user interface to use graduated prompting and ask for clarification and get more precise information—offering more and more examples until a user is able to furnish the information the system needs. As the system continues to get more calls it is expected to become more accurate through the accumulation of data and resultant tuning.
This project represents the first joint venture between Nuance and the MTA. After tuning is more complete, the speech company’s role in the project may recede.
Currently, Nuance is working on a Spanish language version of the application. In the future, MTA may expand Trip Planner Voice to include other features such as text messaging, but no plans have been made definite.
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March 23, 2009 — Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN), a leading supplier of speech solutions, today announced that its RadWhere speech recognition solution has significantly improved radiology workflow and productivity at three highly regarded facilities: Cook Children’s Health Care System in Fort Worth, Texas; University of Florida Health Science Center Jacksonville; and University of Mississippi Medical Center. With accuracy rates up to 99 percent, RadWhere improves the day-to-day tasks of everyone involved in the interpretation and delivery of diagnostic imaging exams, from referring physician to technologist, and ultimately increases the quality of patient care.
At the core of the RadWhere application is the latest in structured speech recognition technology, optimized specifically for the radiology domain to work within picture archiving and communication system (PACS) and radiology information system (RIS) environments and significantly reduce or eliminate the need for transcription. RadWhere goes beyond speech recognition, offering numerous dictation options to meet the unique needs of each user. Radiologists may complete reports in real-time with free text speech recognition, standard site templates, individual radiologist templates and other features focused on meeting the industry need for reduced turnaround time, increased accuracy and consistency of reporting, as well as improved provider efficiency.
Cook Children’s Health Care System
“We switched to RadWhere because of its superior speech recognition abilities, even with foreign dialects,” said John Mowry, Digital Imaging Manager, Cook Children’s Health System. “The number of studies that we’re able to complete with so few radiologists since implementing RadWhere is astonishing. RadWhere has enabled us to go from about 46 percent self-editing with more than a 20-hour turnaround time (TAT) to 99 percent self-editing with less than a six-hour average TAT.”
Cook Children’s Health Care System, a pediatric hospital that services Tarrant County in Texas, went live with RadWhere in September 2008. The facility is tasked with processing approximately 135,000 studies per year with only three full-time radiologists. RadWhere helped tremendously with productivity, eliminating wasted time spent on sign-off by enabling radiologists to complete reports all at once without the back-and-forth transcription approval process. Cook’s has saved approximately $9,000 per month since implementing RadWhere, totaling about $54,000 in less than six months. Return on investment (ROI) was realized in just four months.
University of Florida Health Science Center Jacksonville
“We were looking for a more sophisticated system offering faster speeds and advanced capabilities to coincide with institutional growth,” said Arif Kidwai, MD, Clinical Assistant Professor and Chief of the Division of Informatics, University of Florida Health Science Center Jacksonville. “RadWhere is a prime example of how intelligent software can streamline workflow while helping to also cut costs and improve care.”
University of Florida Health Science Center Jacksonville, a 700-plus bed facility with a large emergency room and Level 1 Trauma Center, switched to RadWhere in September 2007. With 16 attending radiologists and 21 residents, the facility completes 280,000 exams per year. At initial implementation, it took just one weekend for RadWhere to become fully functioning within the current PACS environment. The flexibility and workflow management capabilities of RadWhere, specifically its ability to provide for peer and technologist review all within the same system, have made it an invaluable tool for enhancing both productivity and quality.
The University of Mississippi Medical Center
“Since deploying RadWhere, the productivity of the radiologists at The University of Mississippi Medical Center has gone through the roof,” said Daryle Heath, Director of Imaging Services, The University of Mississippi Medical Center. “These are tough times for us all and healthcare entities are certainly not immune to economic pains. Now more than ever, we’re relying on strategic IT investments, such as RadWhere, because of their proven return on investment.”
The University of Mississippi Medical Center, which has 25 resident radiologists and less than 20 staff radiologists, has been fully utilizing RadWhere since May 2008 within their current PACS. Currently, about 40 radiologists are servicing physicians from all over the state using RadWhere to process approximately 260,000 exams per year. Deployment of the technology took less than 90 days, and since then the facility has eradicated all transcription, leading to annual savings of approximately $900,000. ROI was realized in less than six months, while TAT went from 80 percent of reports completed within 24 hours to 99.9 percent of reports completed in that same timeframe.
RadWhere offers integration into existing radiology workflow, from a single multi-site worklist to automated structured reporting to voice driven navigation, editing, and electronic signature. For more information about RadWhere, please visit http://www.nuance.com/healthcare/products/radwhere.asp.
Nuance’s Healthcare Business
Nuance’s healthcare portfolio of proven, speech-enabled clinical documentation and communication solutions includes the eScription platform for computer aided medical transcription (CAMT), Dictaphone Enterprise Speech System on-premise platform for integrated transcription workflow and speech recognition, Dragon Medical for real-time speech recognition within an EHR, the SpeechMagic information capturing platform, radiology solutions including PowerScribe, RadWhere, RadPort, RadCube, Focus Infomatics, Inc. for outsourced transcription services, and Veriphy critical test results management. All of these solutions enable healthcare provider organizations to reduce operating costs, increase reimbursement, and enhance patient care and safety. No matter the specific requirements of a healthcare provider organization, Nuance has solutions to meet its needs.
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On-Device Self Service for Simple Fixes Eliminates Need to Sit in Queue
BURLINGTON, MA — April 14, 2009 — Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) today announced findings that show consumers are more demanding than ever, and require access to customer care directly from their mobile devices. The results of the study revealed that 62 percent of users said they want to bypass automated systems and be given an opportunity to use their mobile phone screen to complete simple inquiries that should not require agent intervention.
The study focused on how consumers want to receive customer support from enterprises and mobile carriers in the U.S. The report shows that over 60 percent of mobile users believe on-device self service is an important offer and want access to it on their mobile phone. Additionally, over 80 percent of users surveyed want the ability to complete an entire customer service interaction, such as paying a bill or upgrading an account, directly on their mobile device versus enduring long wait times for a live agent.
On-device self service provides carriers a solution that solves basic consumer inquiries, like paying a bill, directly on the mobile phone. This leads to a meaningful bottom line savings considering over 60 percent of consumers have contacted customer care more than three times in the last six months.
“Wireless carriers and enterprises need to adjust their customer care offerings by providing consumers information when they want it, where they want it and how they want it,” said Sheryl Kingstone, director of Mobile and Wireless Communications at Yankee Group. “On-device self service provides this capability by solving many of the problems subscribers have on the device – providing a powerful user experience and significant cost savings to the operator.”
“Nuance is seeing an increase in consumer awareness across the board, which has increased the options that carriers can consider when they are thinking about their customer care strategy.” said Mikael Berner, SVP and GM Enterprise Division at Nuance. “Self-service on the mobile device is the next natural progression of the call center.”
Consumers are becoming more comfortable with utilizing the handset for more than just basic calls. The mobile users surveyed had an age span across all demographics, with 18-24 year-olds admitting to using their mobile phone all the time, even at home, while the 55-58 year age group also held strong at 42 percent. Additionally, the study illustrates trends similar to that of desktop internet use stating by 2012 mobile internet habits are forecasted to resemble that of today’s PC habits. Based on the Yankee Group research, there are many reasons consumers contact customer care, including:
- 50 percent of respondents call to question a line item on a bill
- 44 percent call to pay a bill
- 24 percent call just to get a confirmation of an automated transaction
The following is excerpted from a commissioned work conducted by Yankee Group on behalf of Nuance Communications as of March 2009.
All of these call drivers are solved with Nuance Mobile Care’s simple, on-device self-service solution, including the ability to make account inquiries or pay bills directly without having to wait in queue. Nuance has seen an automation rate of over 60 percent thus far, and through external focus groups has found that 90 percent of users preferred on-device self service to other forms of self service.
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