Nuance enhances its NLP initiative for the healthcare industry

Nuance Communications has made advancements in its Natural Language Processing (NLP) initiative for the healthcare industry by adding new technologies and capabilities.
 
The company says it has improved the clinical documentation process for healthcare organisations by extending the power of its speech-driven solutions that cater to both to clinicians’ documentation preferences and provider organisations’ need to create structured data within their electronic health records (EHR).  Nuance will deliver its NLP-powered clinical documentation solutions to help analyse, structure and utilise the more than 80% of unstructured clinical documentation that exists in the healthcare industry today.
 
NLP 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.
 
The NLP solutions will enable the extraction of clinically relevant data. This data can be used for clinical decision making, resulting in improved patient care and a reduction in overall healthcare costs.
 
Nuance will also help healthcare organisations advance efforts to qualify for Meaningful Use reimbursements associated with certified EHR technology.
 
The company also shared that it has acquired key technologies and researchers from Language and Computing (L&C).
 
Nuance has also formed a strategic partnership with Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), which will enable the company to incorporate MGH’s NLP solution, Smart Dictation, into its own solution portfolio for the healthcare market. Nuance will exclusively license Smart Dictation NLP, a 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.