Healthcare Organizations Look To Nuance To Help Master Meaningful Use And Other Quality Reporting And Coding Mandates

Leading Health IT and Healthcare Organizations Integrate Nuance Clinical Language Understanding to Simplify Capture and Extraction of Structured Data from Physician Narrative

Nuance Communications, Inc. recently announced increasing adoption of its clinical language understanding (CLU) technology to help healthcare organizations achieve Meaningful Use and deliver structured data for various regulatory, quality reporting and coding initiatives. Among the organizations utilizing Nuance’s CLU technology are Epic and other leading electronic health record (EHR) and health IT vendors; prestigious health systems, including Landmark Hospitals; as well as more than 500 healthcare application developers that are integrating cloud-based CLU and medical speech recognition from Nuance Healthcare’s Development Platform.

“By integrating Nuance’s clinical language understanding and speech recognition with our electronic health record, our physicians get the best of both worlds in the workflow that suits them – they can efficiently capture the complete patient narrative and the discrete details needed to populate the EHR are automatically pulled in one fell swoop,” said Joe Morris, chief technology officer, Landmark Hospitals. “Considering the increased documentation complexity associated with current regulatory mandates, we are providing our physicians with intelligent technologies that simplify clinical documentation and allow physicians to focus on quality patient care.”

CLU Generates Actionable, Structured Health Data

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is currently addressing the challenge of structured data capture because it is a critical ingredient in broad-based information sharing, which will lead to improved patient care. Nuance’s CLU helps providers meet the ONC’s structured data capture requirement by enabling physicians to seamlessly document the complete patient story in their own language and workflow while simultaneously extracting the key clinical data required to meet broader regulatory mandates.

“Our CLU technologies for healthcare are unique in that we are able to leverage our investments in industry-leading consumer voice and natural language understanding to optimize this technology for clinical use,” said Peter Durlach, senior vice president marketing, Nuance Healthcare. “We are committed to delivering solutions, like CLU, that help healthcare providers of all sizes tackle the tumultuous sea of regulatory change that they are facing today – from Meaningful Use to value-based purchasing.”

CLU Integrates with Electronic Health Records

To help healthcare providers streamline structured data capture from the physician narrative, the Nuance-Epic integration automatically extracts relevant facts such as problems, diagnoses, medications and allergies from dictated or typed patient notes. These facts are automatically populated into structured fields in the Epic EHR. Using this technology, customers will be able to boost clinical documentation productivity, save physician's time and ensure the creation of a quality patient note. This integration is available for demonstration at the HIMSS 2013 Annual Conference and Exhibition taking place in New Orleans, March 4-6, 2013.

To learn more about Nuance’s suite of cloud-based, clinical language understanding solutions and to see other partner solutions in action, please stop by Nuance’s booth at HIMSS #4025 or visit Nuance Clinical Language Understanding.

Nuance Healthcare

Nuance Healthcare, a division of Nuance Communications, is the market leader in creating clinical understanding solutions that drive smart, efficient decisions across healthcare. As the largest clinical documentation provider in the U.S., Nuance provides solutions and services that improve the entire clinical documentation process — from the capture of the complete patient record to clinical documentation improvement, coding, compliance and appropriate reimbursement. More than 450,000 physicians and10,000 healthcare facilities worldwide leverage Nuance’s award-winning, voice-enabled clinical documentation and analytics solutions to support the physician in any clinical workflow and on any device. For more information, visit www.nuance.com/for-healthcare/index.htm.

About Nuance Communications, Inc
Nuance Communications, Inc. 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, visit www.nuance.com.