News | October 13, 2010

Nuance Partners With IBM

Last week, Nuance Communications, Inc. and IBM, announced that the companies are working together to advance the state-of-the-art in Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) technologies that will enable healthcare organizations to understand and utilize the unstructured clinical information contained in the more than two billion patient reports dictated every year in the U.S. alone.

With the goal of transforming healthcare clinical documentation through advanced technologies, Nuance and IBM are developing systems that will automatically extract and convert discrete clinical data from clinician-dictated narrative into actionable information that can be used to bring a more evidence-based approach to patient care.

With these advanced CLU technologies integrated into Nuance's suite of front-end and back-end speech recognition solutions, clinicians will be empowered to document via speech recognition into the EHR knowing a CLU-enhanced system can process, identify and extract important clinical data elements such as problems, social history, medications, allergies, and procedures from the free-form narrative text.

Access to this information will drive better and more cost-effective patient care across the healthcare industry and will strengthen healthcare organizations' efforts to comply with quality reporting requirements, pay-for-performance initiatives, and improve their level of coding and overall compliance.

Our customers have asked us to broaden our mission and leverage our deep knowledge of healthcare technology and clinical workflow to help reduce the complexity and cost of clinical documentation and deliver a highly-optimized flow of information to the EHR and other clinical and revenue cycle systems.

Our leadership in achieving this critical goal is reflected by our continued investment and participation in major industry initiatives, strategic acquisitions and partnerships, and major technology advances. And, we will deliver on this mission by offering a wider range of products and services that will help healthcare organizations achieve their objectives in this time of increasing quality needs and lower financial resources.

To learn more about CLU, a major cornerstone in the transformation of healthcare clinical documentation, visit http://www.nuance.com/for-healthcare/resources/nlp/index.htm.

SOURCE: Nuance Communications, Inc. and IBM