BURLINGTON, Mass., June 27, 2016 –Nuance Communications, Inc. today outlined its strategy to improve the clinician experience by focusing on the complete and accurate patient record – the heart of better quality patient care, compliance and financial outcomes. By delivering the technologies and services that allow physicians and care teams – and even patients – to naturally and efficiently create and share timely information, Nuance is helping eliminate insufficient clinical narratives that take time away from caring for patients. More than 300 million patient stories each year are communicated by clinicians using Nuance clinical documentation solutions.

As our healthcare system shifts to increased transparency of patient records and mandates more data collection and reporting, much of that burden is falling on clinicians. The more time spent interacting with documentation and trying to fill gaps in a patient’s story means less time spent interacting with patients, with widespread ramifications:

• For physicians, the resulting negative impact on job satisfaction and burnout is significant and further exacerbates the existing physician shortage. See infographic
• For healthcare organizations, incomplete or inaccurate clinical documentation will hurt reputations and payer reimbursement.
• And most importantly, quality patient care is affected when information is missing or incomplete, exposing everyone to unnecessary risks.

Nuance Clinical Documentation Solutions Save Time and Improve Documentation Accuracy

Documentation is critical to healthcare outcomes, yet too much of a physician’s day is spent on it, including the all-too-common practice of after-hours documentation. In fact, 43 percent of a physician’s day is spent on data entry. Speech recognition helps reduce this burden: saving 2.5 hours of documentation for every hour dictated, and making physicians who use clinical speech recognition 23 percent happier. (1)

“Nuance gives a half million physicians a more natural and efficient way to communicate a patient’s clinical story within their workflow using speech recognition and transcription services, medical image sharing via the cloud and even intelligent assistants,” said Satish Maripuri, executive vice president and general manager of the Healthcare Division, Nuance. “From our innovative Dragon Medical One unified and secure cloud-based platform to the new Nuance Velocity mobile ambulatory documentation tool, we are focusing on freeing physicians to have more time to deliver higher-quality patient care.”

Nuance Clinical Documentation Improvement Solutions Influence Physician and Hospital Quality

At the most fundamental level, quality care starts with a physician’s clinical interpretation of patient health. The richness of the patient record is further enhanced with additional notes and images that – ideally – are gathered real-time, evaluated immediately to ensure completeness and accuracy, and are available at any time to anyone on the patient’s care team from any location or device. Nuance works with hospitals and physicians to make this a reality through a combination of technology solutions and experts that address clinical narrative capture, clinical documentation improvement (CDI) and diagnostic imaging.

A study released earlier today proves the positive impact Nuance’s CDI has on hospital quality as measured using Quantros’ CareChex®, a leading quality ranking system and publicly available website. The CDI Quality Impact joint study demonstrates that hospitals using Nuance CDI outperformed their peers, consistently scoring higher on quality metrics in major categories including Overall Mortality and Inpatient Quality.

Resources

• Visit Nuance “Healthcare Insights” — resources exploring the connection between satisfied physicians, productive organizations, and quality care
• Read “Physicians Playing Catchphrase to Prevent Quality Problems” — Dr. Tony Oliva’s blog post on juggling ICD-10 compliance, quality ratings and reputations.
• Watch video — Dr. Brian Yeaman describes how creating a richer physician note provides a better patient and physician experience.

(1) J Med Internet Res. 2015 Nov 3;17(11):e247. doi: 10.2196/jmir.5072

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, please visit www.nuance.com. Connect with Nuance on social media through the healthcare blog, What’s next, as well as LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Trademark reference: Nuance Clintegrity CDI, Dragon Medical One, and Nuance Velocity are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other company names or product names referenced herein may be the property of their respective owners.