Nuance - one of the tech industry's key players on the voice recognition and digital speech front - happens to also have a deep interest in healthcare. Nuance Healthcare has developed a platform - Nuance 360 | Understanding Services - a clinical language (dubbed Clinical Language Understanding, or CLU) software development kit (SDK) that includes a secure portal and code that enables developers to embed CLU in their mobile, web-based and/or desktop healthcare applications.
To help drive the use of CLU, Nuance Healthcare has just kicked off its 2012 Understanding Healthcare Challenge. This interactive challenge asks developers to explore how they’d integrate Nuance 360 | Understanding Services into their own healthcare applications - especially on the mobile front - to improve patient care and provider efficiencies. The Challenge runs from September to October 5 and will reward the top three developers with the most creative CLU use cases with a developer package worth up to $5,000.
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What is particularly important about this is that CLU enables the extraction of key facts from a dictated or free-text patient note. These facts, like medications, allergies and vitals, are crucial to capture and relates to enabling healthcare provider organizations to meet Meaning Use Stage 1. Meaning Use Stage 1 is the first phase of the United States federal government's meaningful use incentive program, which details the requirements for the use of electronic health record (EHR) systems by hospitals and eligible health care professionals.
CLU specifically looks to deliver on the following:
- Addresses physicians’ concerns for efficiency
- Preserves the patient’s unique clinical story
- Enables physicians to document their clinical decision making processes
- Integrates into physician and enterprise workflows, enhancing acceptance
- Supports organizational needs for structured data
- Streamlines Electronic Health Record (EHR) population from the narrative by automatically extracting clinical facts from dictation
- Helps accelerate EHR adoption so providers can realize the value of their HIT investments
- Supports compliance with EHR certification criteria
Clinical Language Understanding supports the comprehensive documentation of care through narrative dictation, capturing the uniqueness of patient encounters and documenting the clinical decision-making process. It accomplished this without the limitations of rigid documentation "templates". The most important aspect of the technology, however, is that CLU allows for specific key patient data capture that is then identified and automatically saved as structured data in the EHR's database, where information can be analyzed, reported and used for better patient care. The conversion of free text into structured data is critical for driving not only efficiency in electronic storage, but for creating the type of data that leads to much higher levels of evaluative capability and subsequently to far more accurate diagnoses.
Further, Clinical Language Understanding technology allows a computer - and more specifically in today's world - mobile devices - to read and understand electronic free text and extract data for use in numerous applications across the healthcare spectrum. CLU analyzes free text dictation, tags the most important clinical data elements such as problems, social history, medications, allergies, and procedures, and then populates electronic medical records, enabling applications that range from retrospective analysis across large amounts of medical records to medical decision support right at the point of care.
Although Nuance aims to cover the entire range of underlying computer hardware and network infrastructure, it has more recently cast a specific eye on the rapidly emerging presence of mobile devices within the entire range of health provider environments. CLU is a natural match for extending the capabilities of mobile applications within healthcare - we hope to see some powerful applications emerge through the Nuance developer challenge.
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
