Partners to Develop Speech and Understanding Solutions to Improve Delivery of Care; Standardizing on Nuance Products Expected to Lower Costs and Improve Efficiency for UPMCBURLINGTON, MA, August 10, 2011 — UPMC and Nuance Communications, Inc., (NASDAQ: NUAN) today announced a multi-year, multi-million-dollar innovation collaboration, in which the two industry leaders will develop Medical Intelligence solutions as a means to transform the way patient information is captured, understood and used by caregivers. The goal is to improve the quality and efficiency of care by creating a more complete and accurate electronic medical record (EMR), first across UPMC and then more broadly across the healthcare industry.
Nuance and UPMC have signed a 10-year joint development agreement under which they will create speech and clinical language understanding (CLU)-enabled technologies. Representing a new class of innovation in the world of health information technology and natural language processing, Medical Intelligence solutions from Nuance and UPMC will transform clinical data into actionable information that can be used to drive smarter clinical, business and compliance decisions. Currently, most medical data 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. 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," said Jeffrey A. Romoff, president and chief executive officer of UPMC.
UPMC, a $9 billion global health enterprise with more than 50,000 employees, is widely known and respected for its medical and technological expertise and its innovative partnerships with such industry leaders as Alcatel-Lucent, IBM and GE Healthcare. UPMC is the only organization to be named one of the "most wired" hospitals for 13 consecutive years by Hospitals & Health Networks and ranked fifth last year in the InformationWeek 500, a list of technology innovators across all industries.
"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 Best in KLAS healthcare IT solutions at more than 20 hospitals, 30 imaging centers and more than 400 outpatient sites. After an extensive competitive evaluation process, UPMC selected Nuance as its enterprise-wide partner for speech and natural language processing solutions.
"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, M.D., vice president, medical information technology, at UPMC.
Under the terms of the joint development agreement, 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. 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. Combined, these collaborations unite the industry's foremost technological and clinical expertise to introduce the state-of-the-art in voice and language understanding technologies for healthcare. For more information on Nuance's work with 3M visit: Nuance and 3M Team to Deliver Next Generation ICD-10 Ready Clinical Documentation Solutions and for more on Nuance and IBM, visit: IBM to collaborate with Nuance to Apply IBM's Watson Analytics Technology to Healthcare.
About UPMC
UPMC is a $9 billion global health enterprise with more than 50,000 employees headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pa., and is transforming health care by integrating more than 20 hospitals, 400 doctors' offices and outpatient sites, a health insurance services division, and international and commercial services. Affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences, UPMC is redefining healthcare by using innovative science, technology, and medicine to invent new models of accountable, cost-efficient, and patient-centered care. For more information on how UPMC is taking medicine from where it is to where it needs to be, go to www.UPMC.com.
About Nuance Healthcare
Nuance Healthcare, a division of Nuance Communications, is the market leader in providing clinical understanding solutions that accurately capture and transform the patient story into meaningful, actionable information. Thousands of hospitals, providers and payers worldwide trust Nuance speech-enabled clinical documentation and analytics solutions to facilitate smarter, more efficient decisions across the healthcare enterprise. These solutions are proven to increase clinician satisfaction and HIT adoption, supporting organizations to achieve Meaningful Use of EHR systems and transform to the accountable care model. Recognized as "Best-in-KLAS" 2004-2010 for Speech Recognition we invite you to learn more, http://www.nuance.com/for-healthcare/index.htm.
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About Nuance Communications, Inc.
Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) is a leading provider of voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with devices and systems. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance's proven applications. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.
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