Nuance has partnered with The Health Management Academy (The Academy) to launch The AI Collaborative, an industry group focused on advancing healthcare using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Nuance became a household name for creating the speech engine recognition engine behind Siri. In recent years, the company has put a strong focus on AI solutions for healthcare and is now a full-service partner of 77 percent of US hospitals and is trusted by over 500,000 physicians daily. Earlier this year, Microsoft acquired Nuance with the promise of ushering in a "new era of outcomes-based AI". Microsoft is also active in the healthcare space and its acquisition of Nuance was investigated by regulators over concerns it may reduce competition.

Conversational AI specialist Nuance and software giant Microsoft are partnering to help reduce the amount of administrative work associated with documenting patient care. The agreement will see both companies accelerate the delivery of ambient clinical intelligence technologies, which can help improve productivity by streamlining administrative tasks. ACI is built on Nuance's Dragon Medical One cloud platform and speech recognition and natural language understanding technology, enhanced by the company's domain expertise and healthcare optimized conversational AI solutions already in use around the world. The partnership between Microsoft and Nuance combines Nuance's expertise in conversational AI, clinical documentation and decision-support solutions for healthcare with Microsoft's strengths in delivering cloud and AI solutions. The two companies will also work closely in sync with their electronic health record partners to improve the clinician experience.

Today, Microsoft and Nuance Communications announced a strategic partnership to accelerate the development of Nuance's Ambient Clinical Intelligence (ACI) solution, announced at HIMSS earlier this year. Built on Microsoft Azure, the partnership will bring together the two companies' strengths in developing ambient sensing and conversational AI solutions in order to reduce the burden of clinical documentation, so doctors can focus more time on patients. Physician burnout is at epidemic levels. A recent study shows that primary care doctors now spend two hours on administrative tasks for every hour they're involved in direct patient care. Physicians reported one to two hours of after-hours work each night, mostly related to administrative tasks.

Microsoft and Nuance announced Oct. 17 that they are teaming up to create the "exam room of the future" using artificial intelligence and other technologies. The goal is to allow physicians to focus more of their time on patient care rather than administrative tasks, which would reduce burnout rates. Microsoft and Nuance want to build a tool that allows clinical documentation to write itself. Per the agreement, Nuance will incorporate its speech recognition and processing solutions with Microsoft's Azure and Azure AI. The voice-recognition software is already used by more than 500,000 physicians globally.