PITTSBURGH – UPMC and Burlington, Mass.-based Nuance Communications have signed a 10-year agreement on a multi-million-dollar project to develop what they’ve dubbed Medical Intelligence solutions. The idea is to transform the way patient information is captured, understood and used by caregivers.
 
Under the agreement, the two organizations will develop speech and clinical language understanding (CLU)-enabled technologies. As the partners see it, Medical Intelligence solutions will transform clinical data into actionable information that can be used to drive smarter clinical, business and compliance decisions. Most medical data today is captured as unstructured free text and cannot be easily analyzed.

"Smart technology is essential to the patient-centered, accountable care that we are committed to providing at UPMC," said Jeffrey A. Romoff, UPMC president and CEO. “Healthcare is rich in data that can be converted to intelligence and understanding. By partnering with Nuance, we can enable smarter use of clinical data across the industry.”

“UPMC’s deep expertise in medicine and patient care combined with Nuance’s unmatched leadership in speech and language understanding technologies has the ability to change the face of healthcare delivery,” said Paul Ricci, chairman and CEO of Nuance. “Together, we’ve entered into a unique and powerful collaboration that will accelerate the role healthcare IT plays in making clinical data more valuable.”

The partnership between Nuance and UPMC also comprises an extensive technology and services license agreement in which UPMC will standardize on Nuance’s healthcare IT solutions at more than 20 hospitals, 30 imaging centers and more than 400 outpatient sites.

“By integrating speech and language understanding into the workflow of UPMC’s clinicians, we can save time, improve the accuracy and breadth of what is captured in the electronic record, and open the door to rich analytics that will help us to better understand what works and doesn’t work in medicine,” said Rasu Shrestha, MD, vice president, medical information technology, at UPMC.
 
Nuance and UPMC will focus initially on CLU technology and decision-support tools that will help clinicians capture all relevant clinical details as they dictate notes for the medical record. This is expected to improve quality reporting, coding and billing.

Other areas being explored by the partners include data mining specifically tied to the federal government’s “meaningful use” requirements for electronic records and creation of tools that will allow clinical document repositories to be easily searched and analyzed. The solutions developed as part of the agreement will be commercially available through Nuance starting late this year.

Nuance’s work with UPMC reinforces the commitment and expands the resources that Nuance has directed to advance CLU, including strategic partnerships and development efforts with IBM and 3M, said Nuance executives.