What You Should Know:
- Nuance Communications, Inc., a Microsoft Company, and Providence, a not-for-profit health system serving the Western U.S., have announced that the organizations are working to accelerate AI innovation at scale, propel in-house solutions development, advance clinical research and spur further collaborations between health systems and healthcare IT vendors.
- Through its long-standing collaboration with Nuance and Microsoft, Providence achieved success in migrating solutions to the cloud at scale and accelerating development and adoption of generative AI-powered applications to help improve care quality and access and reduce physicians’ administrative workloads.
Providence’s Strategic Collaboration with Nuance and Microsoft
Providence has integrated Nuance’s conversational, ambient, and generative AI solutions, including Nuance Dragon Ambient eXperience™ (DAX™) and Dragon Medical One, alongside the largest deployment of Nuance PowerScribe radiology reporting solution in the US. These solutions, developed in alignment with Microsoft’s Responsible AI principles, facilitate the creation of connected healthcare experiences, foster collaboration, empower healthcare staff, and maximize the value derived from clinical and operational data using industry-standard data formats.
Continuing its partnership with Nuance and Microsoft, Providence is committed to five main objectives:
1. Enhancing operational efficiency: Leveraging Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare to streamline interoperability and enhance operational efficiency and clinical decision-making with AI-driven insights derived from multimodal data. This Azure-based platform also facilitates secure and privacy-protected data access, enabling the widespread development and adoption of AI solutions throughout the healthcare sector.
2. Driving in-house solutions development: Developing and enhancing purpose-built AI applications like Providence MedPearl, which assists primary care physicians in adhering to appropriate referral guidelines, thereby improving patient access to specialized care. Other in-house solutions include ProvidenceChat, a secure alternative to general-purpose chatbots, Grace, which addresses patient queries preemptively, and ProvARIA, which categorizes patient messages to reduce provider workload and response times.
3. Advancing clinical research: Collaborating on generative AI-powered clinical research solutions, including clinical trial matching and participation.
4. Enhancing physician and patient experiences: Expanding the deployment of solutions like Nuance DAX Copilot, which automates clinical documentation creation during patient examinations, allowing physicians to focus more on personalized patient care. Additionally, Nuance’s Patient Support Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) is being piloted at Providence’s Patient Engagement Center (PEC) to facilitate patients’ use of MyChart.
5. Fostering industry collaboration: Capitalizing on expanded data access, complementary technologies, and shared expertise among organizations to accelerate the development of solutions addressing healthcare’s top challenges and improving patient outcomes. Providence is currently piloting Copilot for Microsoft 365, offering employees real-time intelligent assistance to enhance productivity and creativity across key Microsoft 365 applications.
“Microsoft and Nuance’s unparalleled expertise, depth of AI applications, and scale enables us to uplevel our innovation, with each organization bringing tremendous value to the partnership,” said BJ Moore, Executive Vice President and CIO at Providence. “Our expanded collaboration enables us to rapidly scale and increase the capabilities of many of our existing solutions while creating more personalized and satisfied experiences for patients and providers alike.”