Category: Clinical Documentation

The 51-hospital system and artificial intelligence company are building on their existing collaboration to deploy technology that will allow physicians to focus solely on their patients during visits.

What You Should Know:

–   Nuance announced that it’s planning to sell
two sections of its healthcare business – Health Information Management (HIM)
and Electronic Health Record (EHR) Go-Live Services – to a new independent
company, called DeliverHealth, in early 2021.

– Nuance will be a minority shareholder of DeliverHealth
and continue to provide its technology to the company.

Nuance
Communications, Inc., today announced the planned sale
of the Health Information Management (HIM) Transcription business and the
Electronic Health Record (EHR) Go-Live Services business to a new independent
company, DeliverHealth Solutions LLC
(DeliverHealth), formed by Assured
Healthcare Partners® (AHP®) in partnership with Aeries Technology Group (Aeries).  

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Transaction Details

The HIM Transcription business includes both Nuance Transcription Services (NTS) and the eScription technology platform. The transaction is expected to be completed in early 2021. As part of the self-off, Nuance will be a minority shareholder of DeliverHealth and will continue to provide its technology to the company. DeliverHealth plans to build on HIM, transcription, technology and EHR services already in place while expanding into intelligent, technology-enabled revenue cycle automation and clinical documentation improvement services within the EHR’s workflow in 2021. DeliverHealth will include both Nuance Transcription Services (NTS) and the eScription technology platform. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

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Sell-Off Accelerate Growth as Conversational AI Market
Leader

 The sale
demonstrates Nuance’s continuing execution to focus R&D investments in the
healthcare and enterprise markets – where the company has substantial
competitive advantages and opportunities for growth and value creation. In
2019, for example, Nuance sold its document imaging business to Kofax and
spun-off its automotive business into Cerence, Inc., an independent,
publicly-traded company.

Nuance’s goal with the sale is to enable:

– Existing customers with continued service quality, newly
expanded offerings, and enhancements from DeliverHealth in close collaboration
with Nuance

– Nuance to focus its innovation and market resources as a
pure-play conversational AI market leader while providing continuity of EHR
Go-Live Services and HIM Transcription businesses to existing and new customers
via DeliverHealth

– DeliverHealth to leverage a leading position in healthcare
professional and technology-enabled services, expand global market share,
advance growth plans for the EHR Go-Live and Optimization Services, and provide
enhanced HIM technology and services to a worldwide market in partnership with
Nuance

Nuance’s growth and market leadership in healthcare are
driven by the accelerating adoption and development of its core cloud-based AI
solutions, including the Nuance® Dragon® Ambient eXperience™ (Nuance DAX™)
ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) solution, Nuance Dragon Medical One, Nuance
CDE One, and its array of diagnostic imaging solutions such as PowerScribe One™
and PowerShare™.

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“The dramatic acceleration in the digital transformation of healthcare continues as organizations deploy the power of conversational AI and deeply integrated cloud-based solutions at scale to address physician burnout, expand patient access, and improve system efficiencies and the revenue cycle,” said Mark Benjamin, CEO of Nuance. “With this strategic transaction, we’re aligning our resources to increase our market and technical leadership position in high-growth, high-impact areas that help our customers in a transformative way to improve patient care and operational performance. At the same time, we’re enabling the medical transcription and EHR Go-Live Services businesses to reach their full potential as a separate, focused company benefiting from the enhanced investment and operational experience of AHP and Aeries and technology support from Nuance.”

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The post Clinical Document World | Virtual 2021 appeared first on .

What You Should Know:

– Nuance Communications, Inc. and one of the country’s
largest health systems, Providence, announced a strategic collaboration,
supported by Microsoft, dedicated to creating better patient experiences and ease
clinician burden.

– The collaboration centers around Providence harnessing
Nuance’s AI-powered solutions to securely and automatically capture
patient-clinician conversations.

– As part of the expanded partnership, Nuance and
Providence will jointly innovate to create technologies that improve health
system efficiency by reducing digital friction.

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Nuance® Communications, Inc. and Providence, one of the largest health systems in the
country, today announced a strategic collaboration to improve both the patient
and caregiver experience. As part of this collaboration, Providence will
build on the long-term relationship with Nuance to deploy Nuance’s cloud
solutions across its 51-hospital, seven-state system. Together, Providence and
Nuance will also develop integrated clinical intelligence and enhanced revenue cycle
solutions.

Enhancing the Clinician-Patient Experience

In partnership with Nuance, Providence will focus on the clinician-patient experience by harnessing a comprehensive voice-enabled platform that through patient consent uses ambient sensing technology to securely and privately listen to clinician-patient conversations while offering workflow and knowledge automation to complement the electronic health record (EHR). This technology is key to enabling physicians to focus on patient care and spend less time on the increasing administrative tasks that contribute to physician dissatisfaction and burnout.

“Our partnership with Nuance is helping Providence make it easier for our doctors and nurses to do the hard work of documenting the cutting-edge care they provide day in and day out,” said Amy Compton-Phillips, M.D., executive vice president and chief clinical officer at Providence. “The tools we’re developing let our caregivers focus on their patients instead of their keyboards, and that will go a long way in bringing joy back to practicing medicine.”

Providence to Expand Deployment of Nuance Dragon Medical
One

To further improve healthcare experiences for both providers
and patients, Providence will build on its deployment of Nuance Dragon
Medical One with the Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX). Innovated by Nuance and
Microsoft, Nuance DAX combines Nuance’s conversational AI technology with
Microsoft Azure to securely capture and contextualize every word of the patient
encounter – automatically documenting patient care without taking the
physician’s attention off the patient.

Providence and Nuance to Jointly Create Digital Health
Solutions

As part of the expanded partnership, Nuance and Providence
will jointly innovate to create technologies that improve health system
efficiency by reducing digital friction. This journey will begin with the
deployment of CDE One for Clinical Documentation Integrity workflow management,
Computer-Assisted Physician Documentation (CAPD), and Surgical CAPD, which
focus on accurate clinician documentation of patient care. Providence will also
adopt Nuance’s cloud-based PowerScribe One radiology reporting solution to
achieve new levels of efficiency, accuracy, quality, and performance.

Why It Matters

By removing manual note-taking, Providence enables deeper
patient engagement and reduces burdensome paperwork for its clinicians. In
addition to better patient outcomes and provider experiences, this
collaboration also serves as a model for the deep partnerships needed to
transform healthcare.

The company, which offers a remote scribe services, secured $25 million in private placement financing and began trading publicly on the OTC markets after a reverse merger with Malo Holdings.

What You Should Know:

– Nuance Communications, Inc. announced the U.S.
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is using the Nuance Dragon Medical One
speech recognition cloud platform and its mobile app, PowerMic Mobile.

– The solution helps VA doctors better document patient
care in-person, and now remotely through expanded telehealth services necessary
in the COVID-19 era.

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Nuance® Communications, Inc. today announced that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is using the Nuance Dragon® Medical One speech recognition cloud platform and PowerMic Mobile microphone app to help physicians document patient care provided through dramatically expanded VA telehealth services since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Helping Physicians Document Care During Virtual Visits

The cloud-based technology allows VA physicians to use their voices to capture and document patient stories securely, accurately, and more efficiently during virtual visits conducted by phone and the widely deployed VA Video Connect platform. Nuance Dragon Medical One is the leading medical speech recognition solution today used by over 550,000 physicians. Compatible with the VA CPRS and Cerner Millennium, it is a key productivity component in EHR solutions throughout the Federal Government, including Veterans Affairs and the Military Health System. Because the VA first standardized on Nuance cloud-based Dragon Medical solutions system-wide in 2014, physicians could readily adopt the added capabilities and mobile flexibility of Dragon Medical One for telehealth services.

“Helping frontline clinicians at the VA and other major health systems has been our highest priority since the pandemic began,” said Diana Nole, executive vice president and general manager of healthcare, Nuance. “The combination of our cloud-based platforms, organizational agility and deep experience working with the VA health system made it possible for us to act quickly and deliver the technology solutions needed to protect and assist physicians treating patients remotely. While our strong sense of mission and purpose in serving critical healthcare organizations and businesses already is very clear, it becomes amplified knowing that our technology solutions are playing a role in caring for our nation’s Veterans.”

What You Should Know:

– Curation Health raises an undisclosed Series A round of funding to accelerate the adoption of its advanced clinical decision support platform.

– Curation Health provides an advanced clinical decision
support platform for providers and health plans that aids in managing risk
contracts and improving quality performance.

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Curation Health, an Annapolis, MD-based advanced clinical decision support platform for value-based care, today announced the completion of Series A financing round for an undisclosed amount led by Deerfield Management Company, including participation from existing investor WindRose Health Investors.

Founded in 2018 by a team of healthcare veterans and clinicians, Curation Health helps providers and health plans effectively navigate the transition from fee-for-service to value-based care. The company’s advanced clinical decision support platform for value-based care drives more accurate risk adjustment and improved quality program performance by curating relevant insights from disparate sources and delivering them in real-time to clinicians and care teams. With Curation Health, clinicians enjoy a streamlined, comprehensive clinical documentation process that enables better clinical and financial outcomes while simultaneously reducing clinical administrative burdens on providers.

Helping Clients Battle Challenges of COVID-19

Curation Health’s solutions are proving especially helpful
to clients as COVID-19 intensifies several long-standing challenges: clinician
burnout and frustration with administrative tasks, difficulty identifying
highest-risk patients, and multiple standards and workflows that prevent
efficiencies across teams. To provide even more robust client assistance during
this time of need, Curation Health has continued to focus on expanding their
integration partnerships with leading electronic health record vendors (EHRs)
and introduced an array of platform enhancements over the last six months,
including:

– 20 percent expansion of the platform’s clinical rule set
to identify additional performance opportunities hidden within patient records
and provider information systems;

– Deployment of an accelerated implementation program,
enabling provider adoption of the platform and workflows in as few as 30 days;
and

– Multiple new features and functionality that further
expedite point-of-care clinical documentation and engage physicians in
compliance and workflow best practices

Recent Traction/Milestones

In just the last six months, Curation Health has also
experienced 125% customer growth as providers and health plans have continued
to prioritize risk management and quality amid COVID-19. New provider and
health plan customers have been compelled by Curation Health’s track record of
helping health plans and providers identify and address undiagnosed and
unmanaged chronic clinical conditions in as many as 1 out of 3 patients, while
also eliminating up to 10 minutes of provider time per patient on unnecessary
clinical administrative tasks. Curation Health will use this latest funding for
strategic hires to support continued customer growth, as well as expansion of
services to clients that rely on the company’s platform to successfully manage
risk contracts and improve quality.

“Our team at Curation is focused on helping customers drive more accurate and compliant risk adjustment and quality performance by enabling efficient pre-visit reviews, integrated point-of-care guidance, and post-visit documentation workflows. This latest infusion of funding will be used to further empower our customers’ value-based care teams with even stronger tools and support,” said Kevin Coloton, founder and CEO of Curation Health.

What You Should Know:

– Augmedix closes $25 million in private placement
funding and completion of a reverse merger transaction with Malo Holdings Corp.

– Following the transaction, the merged entity will be
named “Augmedix, Inc.”, and will continue the historic and innovative
business of Augmedix. 

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Augmedix, a company
specializing in providing remote medical documentation and live clinical
support services, today announced the closing of a $25 million private
placement financing and completion of a reverse merger with Malo Holdings Corp.
In connection with the financing, current investors Redmile Group, DCM, and
McKesson Ventures invested alongside new investors.  Financial advisory firms, Stifel, Nicolaus
& Company, Incorporated, B. Riley Securities, Inc., and GP Nurmenkari, Inc.
(as consulted by Intuitive Venture Partners) acted as placement agents for the
private placement.  Montrose Capital
Partners was the sponsor for this transaction.

Reverse Merger Details

Augmedix further announced the completion of a reverse
merger transaction with Malo Holdings Corp., an SEC-reporting public Delaware
corporation. Following the transaction, the merged entity will be named
“Augmedix, Inc.”, and will continue the historic and innovative
business of Augmedix.  In connection with
the financing and merger, Augmedix agreed to cause its common stock to be
quoted on the OTC Markets QB tier, subject to certain terms and conditions.

Remote Medical Documentation & Live Clinical Support

Founded in 2012, Augmedix converts natural clinician-patient
conversation into medical documentation and provides live support, including
referrals, orders, and reminders, so clinicians can focus on what matters most:
patient care. The Augmedix platform is powered by a combination of proprietary
automation modules and human-expert assistants operating in HIPAA-secure
locations to generate accurate, comprehensive, and timely-delivered medical
documentation.

Augmedix services are compatible with over 35 specialties
and are trusted by over one dozen American health systems supporting
telemedicine, medical offices, clinics, and hospitals.  We estimate that our solution saves
clinicians 2–3 hours per day, increases productivity by as much as 20%, and
increases certain clinicians’ satisfaction with work-life balance by 49%

Manny Krakaris, Augmedix Chief Executive Officer, said, “We’re thrilled to complete this financing, which we believe puts Augmedix on the path of accelerated expansion, and will enable us to broaden our operational capabilities, accelerate our technology research and product development, and strengthen our marketing and sales.”  Krakaris noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the growth of telemedicine and enabled Augmedix to showcase its competitive advantages in the medical documentation market.  “Because the Augmedix service is accessed through mobile devices and is telemedicine application-agnostic, our innovative technology allows clinicians access to medical note documentation, regardless of their location,” Krakaris said.

What You Should Know:

– Intermountain Healthcare announced it will scale
Notable’s AI-driven platform across the health system’s clinically integrated
network to support thousands of providers, automate administrative workflows,
streamline the check-in experience for patients, and simplify provider
follow-up.

– The Notable Platform uses intelligent automation to identify and engage more patients in need of care and enables staff and clinicians to better serve patients by eliminating manual, administrative tasks like registration, documentation, and billing. 

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Intermountain
Healthcare, today announced it is partnering with Notable Health to reimagine the
manual, repetitive administrative aspects of patient intake and post-visit
follow-up into a fully automated, intuitive digital experience across the
health system’s clinically integrated network (CIN).

Empowering Digital Transformation from Check-In Through Collections

Intermountain is harnessing Notable Health’s platform to
digitally transform ambulatory check-ins through mobile registration and
virtual clinical intake for both in-person and telemedicine appointments.
Available within general internal medicine groups in the Salt Lake City region,
over 55 percent of patients from these clinics are now completing their entire
digital check-in prior to their office visit, decreasing check-in time by 25
percent. Intermountain reports an industry-leading 94 percent patient
satisfaction rating for their digital check-in and registration experience,
including 86 percent for patients 65 and older.

Notable extends the capabilities of My Health+, Intermountain’s health app, with digital assistants that automate administrative workflows for staff, streamline the check-in experience for patients and simplify follow-up for providers. Following an initial deployment that went live in under one month and results realized across over 100 providers, Intermountain will scale the Notable Platform to support thousands of providers within additional specialties and states across the clinically integrated network in the coming months.

Initial Notable Deployment Outcomes/Results for Intermountain

Intermountain patients benefit from a digital intake process
that assists with registration, verifies insurance eligibility, and prompts
patients to enter symptoms and medications directly from their smartphone through
dynamic questionnaires customized for an individual’s medical history. The
platform enables patients to complete their entire check-in before their visit
for a touchless, paper-free experience. This reduces the number of people in
waiting rooms, and patients can be offered virtual visit options when
appropriate.

Today’s announcement comes after general internal medicine
groups in the Salt Lake City region generated significant results across 100+
Intermountain providers:

· By automating clinical documentation through the Notable
Platform, Intermountain medical assistants save 30 minutes of charting time per
day;

· More than half of patients now complete their entire
digital check-in prior to their office visit, decreasing check-in time by 25%;
and

· Patient satisfaction ratings for digital check-in and
registration have topped 94%, including 86% for patients 65 and older.

“Creating a more seamless and empowered consumer experience is critical to meeting evolving patient expectations. This starts with digitally transforming the complex process of accessing and registering for care,” said Kevan Mabbutt, senior vice president and chief consumer officer at Intermountain. “By engaging patients to provide information through My Health+ about their health before their visit, we can better address what type of care our patients need, and where and when they can receive it across the care delivery continuum.”

What You Should Know:

– Nuance advances conversational AI with Dragon Medical virtual
assistant for Hey Epic! virtual assistant in Epic Hyperspace.

– Building upon Nuance’s Dragon Medical solution already
used by more than 550,000 physicians, this integration with Hey Epic! enables
clinicians to conversationally navigate the EHR, search for information, place
orders, and seamlessly switch hands-free between voice assistant and dictation.

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Nuance®
Communications, Inc., today announced the advancement of Nuance’s
virtual assistant technology for customers using the Epic electronic health record (EHR). Built
upon Nuance’s leading Dragon Medical solution already used by more than 550,000
physicians, Nuance’s virtual assistant integration with Hey Epic! enables
clinicians to conversationally navigate the EHR, search for information, place
orders, and seamlessly switch hands-free between voice assistant and dictation.

Why It Matters

Virtual assistant technology is viewed as essential to
enable clinicians to complete administrative and clinical tasks more
efficiently and easily during in-person and virtual visits – to improve both
physician and patient experiences before, during, and after each encounter.
 The Nuance virtual assistant technology for Hey Epic! in Hyperspace is
available through Dragon Medical One, Nuance’s leading cloud-based solution for
clinical documentation.

To date, nearly 80,000 physicians and nurses using Epic have
licensed access to Nuance virtual assistant technology in Epic Haiku and Epic
Rover mobile apps to conversationally navigate the EHR more efficiently, while
conveniently retrieving information such as schedules, patient information,
laboratory results, medication lists and visit summaries.

“I have been using Nuance virtual assistant technology with Hey Epic! in the Haiku mobile application to quickly navigate the EHR, access and dictate clinical notes, and complete other tasks simply by using my voice. This saves time that can be dedicated to patients instead of searching through documentation. Now, having access to this technology in Hyperspace will further our ability to gain situational awareness and access to accurate, timely information that helps us treat the patient to the best of our ability in the moment,” said Dr. Patrick Guffey, CMIO, Children’s Hospital Colorado.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented shift in the way consumers view and access a variety of goods and services—and healthcare is no exception. Recent studies show that many patients, including vulnerable populations like those living with cancer, are delaying recommended care and procedures—and will continue to do so for at least several months amid fears over the safety of in-person visits. In response, reports of providers adapting to offer care virtually are all the more commonplace, with almost half of physicians now treating patients through telemedicine platforms, up from just 18 percent in 2018.

These trends have solidified virtual care as a mainstay, and as a result, the virtual visit has become a commodity—a service that can be provided by many capable vendors. However, the logistics that power the adoption of virtual care are often overlooked. As healthcare administrators turn to telemedicine to resume “non-urgent” healthcare services, we must ensure that best-in-class technology solutions are utilized to improve the virtual care experience—for providers, clinical staff, and, importantly, patients.

Health systems and their networks face significant operational issues when delivering care in a remote setting, due to the range of potential interactions and diversity of devices—adding to the already recognized administrative burden that comes with routine patient care. With each patient visit comes over a dozen manual tasks, including patient intake and registration, in-visit clinical note writing, as well as back-office billing and claims processing. The virtual visit adds even more steps, such as helping patients access the appropriate technology for a two-way video interface or sending custom links to a “virtual waiting room” at the right time.

Facilitating a seamless virtual care experience before, during, and after a patient’s visit should be top-of-mind—particularly as patient expectations have heightened and healthcare has progressed towards a technology-enabled future. Fortunately, the automation of operational workflows can help healthcare administrators smooth the friction around conducting virtual visits at scale.

Intelligent automation extends our capacity in healthcare by enabling us to do more with the same workforce and technology infrastructure. In fact, digital medical assistants can use artificial intelligence to automate repetitive, cognitively tiring, and error-prone tasks. This technology can support the influx of virtual visits by offloading administrative processes, such as co-payment collection, clinical documentation, and pre-population of common clinical orders. 

For patients not as familiar with digital interactions and the variety of telemedicine modalities, which can include platforms like Amwell, Doctor on Demand, and Teladoc or video conference solutions like RingCentral and Zoom, participating in virtual visits can be a daunting change. Additional technological challenges associated with virtual care can result in heightened frustration, increased no-show rates, or decreased activation, so maintaining patient engagement throughout the patient journey is even more important in a virtual environment. Digital medical assistants can automate appointment reminders, offer detailed setup guidance for patients, and provide “just-in-time” virtual visit links to ensure patients and providers can make the most of their time together.

The COVID-19 pandemic has also introduced new variables and risks that patients, providers, and healthcare institutions at-large must consider when seeking and delivering care. Until recently, it was a relatively straightforward process to determine where a patient should receive routine care. Now given the risk of disease spread, providers find themselves considering which patients to see when to see them and whether to see them virtually or in-person.

This creates additional complexity in determining when to schedule patients and in which medium to conduct the visit. Platforms that leverage intelligent automation can help clinical teams to pre-screen all scheduled patients, collect a thorough medical history, intelligently segment patients into risk cohorts and triage each cohort to an individualized destination, be it a return to in-person care or a virtual environment.

In the “virtual exam room,” things also look a little different. From the provider’s perspective, one of the oft-cited drawbacks of virtual visits is the limited ability to measure vital signs, perform a physical exam or order point-of-care diagnostics. At-home diagnostics, wearable devices and remote patient monitoring tools allow providers to collect continuous clinical data that can be gathered asynchronously and quickly, resulting in a more comprehensive picture of a patient’s health. Further, platforms that use intelligent automation algorithms to organize data collected across the care continuum can parse these data streams to identify at-risk patients and then automate outreach and care management to follow clinical care pathways.

The COVID-19 pandemic has given us a unique opportunity to reimagine healthcare using a modern suite of technology for patients, providers and staff that does away with outdated and inefficient processes. But we also have a responsibility to replace them with solutions that improve digital experiences by supporting patients before visits, automating repetitive workflows, and parsing large amounts of data to support clinical decision-making.

Combining intelligent automation with virtual visits creates a powerful tool to efficiently manage patient populations and offer an experience that feels intuitive while enabling healthcare systems to do more with less. By accelerating the digital transformation of healthcare today, we can position ourselves for a future of increased capacity, decreased overhead, and improved quality.

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Muthu Alagappan, MD, is an attending physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, a trained engineer, and medical director at Notable Health, a healthcare experience automation company.