Dive Brief:
- Microsoft-owned Nuance Communications is integrating generative artificial intelligence technology GPT-4 into its clinical notetaking software in the latest step in the ongoing AI arms race.
- This summer, providers using DAX or Dragon Medical One can apply to adopt the clinical documentation application, called DAX Express, which includes the large multimodal model and is notably faster than old Nuance products.
- That’s because DAX Express is fully automated, taking out the human reviewer for quality control in Nuance’s existing medical scribe service, Dragon Ambient Experience. The automation raises questions about quality, given AI still has a ways to go in addressing some limitations in text generation.
Dive Insight:
Nuance’s Dragon products are meant to ease the burden of documentation on clinicians by listening to conversations with patients and transcribing medical visit notes. Historically, the notes have been sent to a human checker for review before being uploaded into the physician’s EHR, which can result in a lag of a few hours.
Now, DAX Express removes human authentication and can return results to doctors in seconds. Nuance has been working on making its software fully automated for years to accelerate how long it takes to pull relevant data into the doctor’s EHR.
DAX Express includes GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest large language model technology that can reason in a human-like manner. Large language models are trained to recognize and respond to text based off data they scrape from the web.
It’s OpenAI’s most advanced — but still experimental — AI. GPT-4 “still has many known limitations that we are working to address, such as social biases, hallucinations, and adversarial prompts,” OpenAI’s website reads.
GPT-4 was popularized earlier this year as the backbone of internet AI chatbot ChatGPT. GPT-4 is also available as an API for developers to build applications and services around it.
Currently, fewer than 100 doctors are piloting DAX Express. Nuance’s goal is to enroll 400 physicians in DAX Express’s beta phase by this summer, according to Stat.
Eventually, DAX Express will be available to more than 550,000 current users of Dragon Medical, according to a spokesperson.
Health IT companies, startups and tech behemoths alike are racing to develop products to ease documentation headaches for providers. Documentation is a major contributor to physician burnout, which by some estimates impacts roughly half of U.S. clinicians.
Microsoft, Google, Apple and Amazon have all developed or are backing clinical assistants, many using voice-to-text software. The space has quickly become crowded with notable players like Google-backed, voice-enabled digital assistant Suki, Apple Watch-supported platform Notable and Amazon’s speech-to-text service, AWS’ Transcribe Medical.
Microsoft acquired Nuance in 2021 for almost $20 billion, two years after it first partnered with the voice-to-text company. The deal doubled Microsoft’s total addressable market in the healthcare provider space.
Currently, 77% of U.S. hospitals are using Nuance’s technology, according to a spokesperson.
