OpenAI-powered app from Microsoft is coming to Epic Systems

Microsoft’s speech recognition subsidiary Nuance Communications on Tuesday announced its artificial intelligence-powered clinical notes application is coming to Epic Systems to assist reduce physicians’ administrative workloads. 

Epic is a health-care software company that helps hospitals and other health systems store, share and access electronic health records. Greater than 500,000 physicians and 306 million patients across the globe use Epic’s offerings, and the corporate has long-standing partnerships with each Microsoft and Nuance. 

The businesses are collaborating to construct a system that may perform lots of clinicians’ back-end administrative responsibilities. Nuance told CNBC on Tuesday that integrating its latest solution, Dragon Ambient eXperience Express, into Epic is a “major step” toward that goal. 

DAX Express routinely generates a draft clinical note inside seconds after a patient visit. It could actually record a conversation between a physician and a patient in real time and create a note using a mix of existing AI and OpenAI’s newest model, GPT-4.

“I believe the magical thing here is that note is produced not in an hour, but in a matter of seconds,” Garrett Adams, product lead for Epic’s ambulatory division, told CNBC in an interview Tuesday. “So whereas it might have taken them so for much longer than that to type it out manually, they now get it higher, faster and with a level of convenience that wasn’t even really possible to assume a decade ago.”

Nuance, which Microsoft acquired for about $16 billion in 2021, sells tools for recognizing and transcribing speech during doctor’s office visits, customer support calls and voicemails. The corporate first announced its DAX Express solution in March, and said in a release Tuesday that the technology is saving clinicians about seven minutes per patient encounter.

Many doctors and nurses across the U.S. are struggling to maintain up with burdensome clerical work, so this time is a helpful commodity within the health-care industry.

A study funded by the American Medical Association in 2016 found that for each hour a physician spent with a patient, doctors spent a further two hours on administrative tasks. The study said physicians also are likely to spend a further one to 2 hours doing clerical work outside of working hours, in what many consult with as “pajama time.”

“The final thing they need to do is pajama time,” Peter Durlach, chief strategy officer at Nuance told CNBC in an interview Tuesday. Adams added that Nuance’s technology can even allow physicians to be more present while they’re meeting with patients.

“The provider is in a position to sit and really concentrate on what the patient is saying, without interested by the entire other things behind their mind that they should keep track of,” he said. “The patient feels lots more connected, lots more listened to.”

Nuance has strict data agreements with its customers, so patient data is fully encrypted and runs in HIPAA-compliant environments.

DAX Express for Epic will probably be available in a non-public preview capability for select users this summer, and Durlach said the corporate hopes to expand to general availability in the primary quarter of 2024.