BURLINGTON, Mass., March 8, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Nuance Communications, Inc., a Microsoft Company, and Providence, a not-for-profit health system serving the Western U.S., have announced that the organizations are working to accelerate AI innovation at scale, propel in-house solutions development, advance clinical research and spur further collaborations between health systems and healthcare IT vendors.

Through its long-standing collaboration with Nuance and Microsoft, Providence achieved success in migrating solutions to the cloud at scale and accelerating development and adoption of generative AI-powered applications to help improve care quality and access and reduce physicians' administrative workloads. Providence also has widely deployed Nuance's conversational, ambient, and generative AI solutions including the Nuance Dragon Ambient eXperience™ (DAX™) and Dragon Medical One, and the largest implementation of the Nuance PowerScribe radiology reporting solution in the United States.

"Microsoft and Nuance's unparalleled expertise, depth of AI applications, and scale enables us to uplevel our innovation, with each organization bringing tremendous value to the partnership," said BJ Moore, Executive Vice President and CIO at Providence. "Our expanded collaboration enables us to rapidly scale and increase the capabilities of many of our existing solutions while creating more personalized and satisfied experiences for patients and providers alike."

Through its continued collaboration with Nuance and Microsoft, Providence will focus on five key areas:

Improve operational efficiency: Use Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare to simplify interoperability and improve operational efficiency and clinical decision-making with AI-generated insights from multimodal data. The Azure-based cloud platform also helps expand secure, privacy-protected data access to accelerate the development and adoption of AI solutions at scale across the industry.

Accelerate in-house solutions development: Create and enhance purpose-built AI-powered applications such as Providence MedPearl, which assists primary care physicians with appropriate referral guidelines for greater patient access to specialized care. Additional in-house solutions include ProvidenceChat — a secure alternative to other general-purpose chatbots that enable caregivers to experiment with generative AI — as well as Grace and ProvARIA. Grace focuses on answering patient questions before they send a message to their provider, while ProvARIA classifies patient messages, reducing providers' workloads and response times.

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