HIMSS: Nuance moves to the cloud, pairs with 3M for ICD-10

Nuance Communications highlighted Nuance Healthcare Development Platform, a cloud-based platform, at HIMSS11 and emphasized its partnership with 3M.

The Burlington, Mass.-based company’s speech recognition capabilities and advancements in Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) technology will be available through a cloud platform, allowing third-party developers to incorporate Nuance Healthcare technologies as part of a variety of healthcare applications and providing users with capabilities for speech-driven clinical documentation, voice navigation and automatic clinical fact extraction.

The Nuance Healthcare Development Platform supports multiple devices and operating systems. By providing intensive speech and language processing in the cloud, the platform enables independent vendors and internal development teams at provider and payor organizations to embed Nuance’s SpeechAnywhere capabilities and CLU functionality as part of browser-based applications, mobile applications and thin-client desktop solutions.

Nuance and 3M Health Information Systems are working together to deliver a suite of ICD-10-ready clinical documentation and coding capabilities. As part of the collaboration, the companies introduced Computer-Assisted Physician Documentation (CAPD).

CAPD is designed to accelerate healthcare organizations’ transition to ICD-10. The technology supports physicians throughout the clinical documentation process, providing access to information needed to support documentation decisions.

As part of the CAPD workflow, clinicians will be able to use speech-recognized dictation to document patient encounters in their own words, preserving the patient story, while also incorporating relevant structured data. When necessary, automated prompts will signal physicians for additional information to help improve documentation and to generate sufficient detail for both ICD-9 and ICD-10 coding.

Nuance and 3M customers who use Dragon Medical, eScription or Dictaphone Enterprise Speech System will have the option to purchase the new CAPD solution. The process is designed to reduce audit risks and decrease staff inquiries to physicians for more information, Nuance said.

 

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