Welcome to This Week Health. This is a conference campaign where we chat with our partners about the exciting 📍 initiatives they have going on in healthcare. As you know, we have a couple of great conferences coming up and we want to give you the opportunity to know some of the great solutions that will be at ViVE and HIMSS and how you can find them there. Let's get right to 📍 it.

Ken Harper, the GM of Nuance DAX. Ken welcome. Welcome to the show.

Thanks Bill. Huge fan happy to be here.

Im looking forward to this conversation. I'm always excited about what Nuance is doing at the shows. And I like to highlight it to make sure that people stop by.

You're going to be at both conferences. You're going to be at the HIMSS conference and the newly minted ViVE conference. So we can catch up with you. A little, little different presentation at both, but you're going to be going through roughly the same things. And I, I want to give people a sneak peek into some of the things that you're going to be doing. So what are you going to be showcasing at the two conferences?

Yeah our focus this year at HIMSS specifically is really going to be on our entire healthcare portfolio and how that can be used to engage both the patient as well as the broader care team to work on all kinds of issues around how can we lessen administrative burden for the care team to how do we more effectively allow patients to engage with their health care system.

So this will be the first time in two years, we're back in person. But we've measured a lot of outcomes with clients over that time. How we're reducing burnout with providers. How we are more effectively allowing providers to spend more time caring for their patients. So with DAX, we're really excited to kind of showcase just how far we've advanced the solution and the technology behind it.

Yeah. So my gosh, every time I talked to a client of yours about Dragon Medical One, I get nothing but rave reviews, I guess, class sort of drove that home. People are really excited about it. The physicians who are using it are very excited about it. Obviously when you roll something like this out system-wide it's challenging.

It's challenging to get all this stuff in. You're the GM of DAX. And we know that this whole, taking the conversation and turning it into a note is so challenging. You have non-verbal cues and things going on in the room and whatnot. Talk to us about what you're going to be showcasing. What kind of advances have we seen in the DAX area?

You're right, bill. I mean, this, this is one of the hardest challenges in healthcare, for sure. How do you take that natural conversation, as you said, and understand the context of what's being discussed so that you can, can automatically author a note on behalf of a provider.

And so what we're going to be showcasing this year. We've been hard at work and the technology behind this. This has been in market a couple, couple of years. And as the result of all that data flowing into our system, a lot of times you might hear data's the new source code. You know, in terms of how these AI solutions really work.

And so over the last couple of years, as we brought this to market across 30 plus specialties, we've just had this influx coming into our system and that's had a virtuous cycle on how we can actually improve the technology underneath the hood if you will. And so the way we rolled this out initially was it was a hybrid approach.

It was sort of half AI. And then we had what we call quality documentation specialists. People on staff that would actually do the quality review. Make sure that the notes being authored by the technology were actually accurate. And so the sneak peek of what we're going to be showing this year is we've gotten the technology so far and so advanced that we're now going to be showcasing with a fully automated capability of DAX looks like. Now we're calling this express mode. We've turned it on. It's in alpha testing right now. We have some live users on it now using it for real patient visits. And so we're going to be showcasing in our experience room for DAX specifically how far the technology has come and what that fully automated document delivery system now looks like. And so that will be the exciting thing for DAX that we're showcasing this year.

Wow. When you talk about outcomes that you've collected over the years and, and also the data, actually, I love this because it's, it's a true platform, right? So the more people who use it, the better the system gets because you're getting more information. It feeds the system, it gets smarter over time.

But talk about the outcomes, because one of the biggest topics I've been talking to a bunch of CIOs lately, and they're being tasked with this challenge of the clinician shortage, right? There's a clinician shortage. The physicians are overworked. There's a heavy burden. What kind of outcomes are you seeing as a result of implementing the Nuance suite of products across the health system?

It's a great question. And I'd start first, maybe just with the, the care team, the clinicians, and there it's really about how do we help their administrative work lessen over time with this technology? And so from an outcomes perspective, what we've been measuring, and again, your mileage will vary a little bit, depending on how many patients you might see or what specialty you practice in.

But what we're measuring as an average across the install base is that DAX is saving about 7 minutes per encounter in documentation time. If you think about just one encounter saving seven minutes, and then you multiply that across the number of encounters your typical practitioner has over the course of a week.

You know, we're talking about hours saved on average. And so to your question, it's really then looking at how is that time doing a couple of things? How is that time helping reduce fatigue and burnout that the care team has. We know this is systemic in healthcare today. But also how is that time also being used to improve access to care?

How can we try to help healthcare organizations get more patients through the system without burdening the healthcare workers even more. And so that's been a big part of what we've been measuring with that, that the time saved with DAX. And I think what's been most exciting is a lot of healthcare organizations are now looking at this very much as a retention and an attraction tool. We just actually had some clients talk to us about sort of what's top of mind for them. And one of the things that always comes up is staffing. How do you actually get healthcare workers in the door and how do you get them to stay? And so DAX has really been something, with all that time being saved, the burnout reduction that we're seeing with care team workers. It's also having a direct correlation with reducing churn for the healthcare organization, as well as using it as a tool to recruit new talent and get more people back into the healthcare system.

You talked about the full suite. Talk about how this integrates with revenue cycle and just makes the whole process better. I assume when you capture the right information upfront, the entire process just flows a lot better.

Yeah, and this, this is really the way we think about it. We think about it through the lens of a care team journey and a patient journey. And when everything that happens along the way, and so part of our portfolio can be used to provide a solution for patients in the front end to capture, some of that information that an MA or someone else might have to do manually input it into the system.

Then you think about Dragon Medical One and DAX as, as documentation capture tools. That's about making sure the right information's in the note and making it very seamless for the healthcare organization to get that information captured and saving all that time in documentation. And then you think about, oh, if the right documentations there, well then your revenue integrity tools, how do you make sure we're engaging in care team workers for some of those specific pieces of information that need to be better specified.

So again, you're making sure that you're optimizing revenue capture within your system and all those things kind of work seamlessly together in a whole care team journey. And so that's the way that we think about optimizing our healthcare portfolio for the clients that we serve.

Yeah. I think, I think proof is in the pudding Bill. It's, it's one thing to see something on a slide and it's something else to actually go and experience in a tangible way exactly what, what these solutions are capable of. And so that's very much what we'll be doing with DAX and we have an entire theater we'll be engaging the participants.

We will be showing the technology in an unfettered way. One of the things we, we do believe in and we espouse at Nuance is actually showing real demonstrations, things that aren't scripted, things that we're not necessarily predicting in advance. Like actually showing how the technology works with someone comes in and they participate in whatever it is that we're demonstrating. And so that's what we're going to see across our entire portfolio.

Yeah. One of the things I used to do as a CIO is I grabbed some physicians and there was a couple, couple of areas I would always stop by. This would obviously be one of the ones. If I had some physicians with me that I would stop by and say, all right, especially if it's not implemented at their system, I'd say, all right, give me your feedback. Will this work in our health system? What are the roadblocks? Who would be the champions for this and, that kind of thing. I assume you're going to be at the conference?

I will be there. Yeah. And I'm excited to show DAX. I will be participating in many of the sessions.