Nuance and Cerner Expand Strategic Voice AI Collaboration to Include Dragon Medical Virtual Assistant Technology

Cerner selects Nuance's virtual assistant platform to reduce the cognitive burden on care teams and improve patient experience

News provided by

Nuance Communications, Inc.

Jul 30, 2020, 07:00 ET

BURLINGTON, Mass., July 30, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Nuance® Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) today announced that it has expanded its long-standing AI collaboration with Cerner Corporation (NASDAQ: CERN) to include the integration of Nuance's virtual assistant technology into the Cerner Millennium® electronic health record (EHR). Building upon the existing integration between Nuance's Dragon® Medical platform and Cerner Millennium, joint clients can utilize Nuance's advanced natural language virtual assistant technology to navigate the EHR using just their voice, giving clinicians more time to spend with their patients and less time with their computer.

The expanded Nuance-Cerner relationship is driven by the healthcare industry's need to mitigate what the World Medical Association is calling a "pandemic of physician burnout" with 51 percent of physicians reporting frequent or constant feelings of burnout. This is caused by a staggering administrative workload of electronic paperwork to document patient care and to meet requirements for insurance coverage, financial reimbursement, and medicolegal liability protection. Research shows that more than 80 percent of physicians believe virtual assistants in health care can reduce the burden on care teams and improve the patient experience. Nuance's virtual assistant technology helps physicians rapidly accomplish tasks and communicate more naturally, while allowing them to use specialized medical terminology across a range of devices and applications with high accuracy.

"Health systems and their care teams are facing unprecedented challenges as they strive to deliver great patient care while dealing with extreme financial pressures and a worldwide pandemic. At Cerner, we are committed to continuing to deliver leading-edge AI-powered solutions, leveraging our open platform approach, to reduce the administrative burden on care teams so they can focus on the patient," said Tanuj Gupta, vice president and physician executive, Cerner Intelligence, Cerner. "With digital transformation happening at a breakneck speed, we are excited to expand our leading AI-enabled technology offerings with Nuance to help us fulfill this mission."

Nuance's deeply embedded virtual assistant technology delivers sophisticated conversational dialogues and skills that automate high-value clinical tasks inside Cerner Millennium, such as chart search, navigation, intelligent computerized physician order entry (CPOE), and scheduling. Nuance technology's high accuracy rates, rich set of voice-activated skills and ability to understand the user's intent in context provides higher levels of workflow automation and more efficient and complete documentation of patient care. Additionally, Nuance's pre-built, HIPAA-compliant natural language understanding models and cloud platform will support Cerner to deploy the solution quickly and easily to joint clients.

"Together with Cerner, we're bringing the next level of conversational AI directly to our joint clients with the goals of improving patient experiences, combating clinician burnout, and reducing costs," said Joe Petro, CTO, Nuance. "Building on our Dragon Medical platform, already used by over 550,000 physicians in the U.S. alone, our new virtual assistant technology will help deliver solutions that automate time-consuming tasks, eliminate inefficiencies, and bring clinical intelligence and better decision-support to clinicians at the point of care."

Select joint Cerner and Nuance clients can expect to start deploying this integrated virtual assistant technology later this year.

About Nuance Healthcare

Nuance provides intelligent systems that support a more natural and insightful approach to clinical documentation, freeing clinicians to spend more time caring for patients. Nuance healthcare solutions capture, improve, and communicate more than 300 million patient stories each year, helping more than 550,000 clinicians in 10,000 global healthcare organizations to drive meaningful clinical and financial outcomes. 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.

About Nuance Communications, Inc.
Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) is the pioneer and leader in conversational AI innovations that bring intelligence to everyday work and life. The company delivers solutions that understand, analyze, and respond to people – amplifying human intelligence to increase productivity and security. With decades of domain and AI expertise, Nuance works with thousands of organizations globally across healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, government, and retail – to empower a smarter, more connected world. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.

About Cerner

Cerner's health technologies connect people and information systems at thousands of contracted provider facilities worldwide dedicated to creating smarter and better care for individuals and communities. Recognized globally for innovation, Cerner assists clinicians in making care decisions and assists organizations in managing the health of their populations. The company also offers an integrated clinical and financial system to help manage day-to-day revenue functions, as well as a wide range of services to support clinical, financial and operational needs, focused on people. For more information, visit Cerner.com, The Cerner Blog or connect on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter or The Cerner Podcast. Nasdaq: CERN. Health care is too important to stay the same.

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. Cerner and Cerner Millennium are registered trademarks of Cerner Corporation or its affiliates.

Nuance Media Contact:
Caitlyn Keating
+ 781.565.8926
[email protected]

Cerner Media Contact:
Stephanie Greenwood
+ 816.201.2137
[email protected]

SOURCE Nuance Communications, Inc.