Last week, Nuance Communications Inc. and Microsoft Corp. announced Nuance Dragon® Ambient eXperience™ (DAX™), an ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) solution, is now integrated into Microsoft Teams to broadly scale virtual consults aimed at increasing physician wellness and providing better patient health outcomes.
The integration of Nuance DAX and Microsoft Teams for telehealth is part of the ongoing strategic partnership to accelerate the adoption of ACI solutions to improve healthcare experiences by reducing administrative workloads that lead to physician burnout. This telehealth workflow solution built on Microsoft Teams:
Synthesizes physician-patient conversations during virtual visits through Microsoft Teams, allowing physicians to remain focused on the patient instead of taking notes on the computer.
Incorporates patient data securely with contextual information from the electronic health record (EHR) to auto-populate a complete and highly accurate clinical note for physicians to review directly within the patient’s medical record. The physician always remains in control.
This is a great partnership, and I like that the solution is built on top of Azure, promoting a cloud-first environment. Here are the hurdles.
Nuance DAX is not cheap, while voice technology will save physician time by incorporating the contextual conversation to the clinical notes; the software ROI is challenging for many healthcare organizations to justify.
Microsoft Teams is not widely adopted as the platform for virtual care. The adoption rate can increase as many healthcare organizations adopt Office 365, which includes Teams, but Microsoft will need to assist in the telemedicine system transition.
Will Teams be a native component inside the EMR or patient portal? This critical feature will be helpful to gain the telemedicine market traction.