Clinical Language Understanding from Nuance

source: http://www.nuance.com/for-healthcare/resources/clinical-language-understanding/index.htm

Clinical Language Understanding

There is a growing demand to extract structured, "actionable" information from unstructured (dictated) medical documents.

Clinical Language Understanding leverages advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), medical Artificial Intelligence (AI) and speech recognition technology to create tailored solutions for healthcare informatics.
Clinical Language Understanding technology can be used to derive patient information from free text and to produce actionable data used to improve patient care and streamline workflow.

• 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

The use of Clinical Language Understanding offers physicians the best of both worlds. It supports the comprehensive documentation of care through narrative dictation, capturing the uniqueness of each patient encounter and documenting the clinical decision-making process without the limitations of rigid documentation "templates". However, unlike "blobs" of free-text, key patient data is identified and automatically saved as structured data in the EHR's database, where information can be analyzed, reported and used for better patient care.

Clinical Language Understanding technology allows a computer to read and understand electronic free text and extract data for use in countless applications across the healthcare spectrum. 360 | Clinical Understanding Services software analyzes free text dictation, tagging the most important clinical data elements such as problems, social history, medications, allergies, and procedures. The tagged elements can then be used to populate electronic medical records, enabling applications that range from retrospective analysis across large amounts of medical records to medical decision support at the point of care.

By integrating one of the most comprehensive medical ontologies and state-of-the-art language processing algorithms, Clinical Language Understanding technology can achieve the highest level of conceptual understanding of clinical narrative and bridge the gap with structured data entry to support advanced healthcare applications.

Nuance Healthcare is the right partner to help physicians and organizations transition to structured data creation, while enhancing the quality of clinical documentation, adoption and utilization of the EHR. Nuance Healthcare leverages its considerable speech and 360 | Clinical Understanding Services technology assets—the industry’s largest portfolio, extensive knowledge and experience, and integration of cutting-edge communication and mobile devices - to create the right solutions for each physician. Moreover, Nuance Healthcare’s partnerships with all the major EHR vendors ensures clinicians direct access to their choice of clinical documentation workflow while data flows seamlessly into the EHR.