Microsoft and Nuance announced Oct. 17 that they are teaming up to create the "exam room of the future" using artificial intelligence and other technologies.
The goal is to allow physicians to focus more of their time on patient care rather than administrative tasks, which would reduce burnout rates. Microsoft and Nuance want to build a tool that allows clinical documentation to write itself.
Per the agreement, Nuance will incorporate its speech recognition and processing solutions with Microsoft's Azure and Azure AI. The voice-recognition software is already used by more than 500,000 physicians globally.
Microsoft and Nuance expect to introduce the technology to a subset of physician specialties in early 2020. The technology will include ambient listening, wake-up word, voice biometrics, signal enhancement, documentation summarization, natural language understanding, clinical intelligence and text-to-speech.
"We have an incredible opportunity to use advances in cloud and AI technology to transform healthcare delivery," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said. "Together with Nuance, we will apply the power of Azure and Azure AI to this challenge, with the aim of improving the day-to-day life of firstline healthcare workers everywhere - so they can provide better care."