Nuance and Epic are bringing latest documentation tool to EHR workflows

Epic and Nuance say Nuance’s Dragon Ambient eXperience Express is going to be integrated into Epic’s electronic health record workflows. (Photo: Ron Southwick)

Epic and Nuance say they’re aiming to make documentation easier for clinicians and reduce the headaches that can drive burnout.

The companies announced this week that Nuance’s Dragon Ambient eXperience Express is going to be integrated into Epic’s electronic health record workflows.

The software allows doctors to record conversations naturally, making it easier to engage patients and give them their full attention. The companies say that DAX Express will enable doctors to have access to their notes immediately after meeting with patients.

Epic and Nuance say DAX Express is the first documentation tool to combine Nuance’s conversational AI with the AI GPT-4 Model in Microsoft’s Azure Open AI Service.

DAX Express builds on the success of the Dragon Ambient Experience, launched in 2020. Hal Baker, chief digital and information officer at WellSpan Health, said in a news release from the companies that DAX Express will allow physicians to focus more on their patients.

"Game-changer is one of the most frequent terms given by our physicians as they describe their impressions of DAX, and we foresee that integrations planned for DAX Express for Epic will take that up a notch. The ability to turn around notes in seconds rather than hours offsets one of the few tradeoffs of DAX,” Baker said in the statement.

Josh Wilda, chief digital and information officer at the University of Michigan Health-West, said the DAX product has enabled doctors to manage documentation in seconds instead of hours.

"DAX Express for Epic will spark a transformational shift in how we all approach healthcare. We've already seen first-hand how ambient AI from Nuance has transformed the provider-patient experience using the DAX ambient solution, but now with the augmentation of generative AI, we're going to give our providers more options to use technology in a way that delivers even greater outcomes to them and their patients," Wilda said in a statement.

Doctors will be able to use DAX Express to help document in-person visits and telehealth appointments.

Nuance and Epic have worked together for years, and the companies have been building on that partnership in recent months. At the HIMSS Conference in April, Epic and Nuance announced that the companies were integrating Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service with Epic’s health record software.

"For both patients and providers, quality care experiences start with meaningful conversations and mutual understanding," Sean Bina, vice president of patient experience at Epic, said in a statement. "For the first time, we can see how conversational understanding, generative AI, and clinical context can together generate high-quality documentation."

Microsoft completed the acquisition of Nuance in March 2022. Peter Durlach, executive vice president and chief strategy officer of Nuance, told Chief Healthcare Executive® in a November interview that the two companies’ strengths complement each other in the effort to make “products that solve real problems.”

“Part of the key thesis for us was bringing the power and scale of Microsoft’s horizontal cloud and AI technology with Nuance’s deep healthcare, vertical expertise,” Durlach said.