August 16, 2018 — At the Association for Medical Imaging Management (AHRA) 2018 Annual Meeting and Exposition, July 22-25 in Orlando, Fla., Nuance Communications Inc. announced the general availability of a cloud-based version of its mPower Clinical Analytics platform for radiology.
mPower Clinical Analytics helps radiologists develop performance improvement strategies through industry benchmarks and best practices. The cloud-based platform enables faster, easier access to actionable insights and provides advanced features, including a new quantitative findings analysis capability. This new feature helps radiologists reduce care delays, evaluate Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) measures and strengthen quality improvement efforts. Also, at the meeting, Nuance demonstrated real-life applications of its AI (artificial intelligence) Marketplace for Diagnostic Imaging, an open platform that is accelerating the development, deployment and adoption of AI for medical imaging.
Nuance’s announcement comes as the healthcare industry enters an era of value-based care in which radiologists spend a tremendous amount of time on paperwork and routine processes due to growing reporting requirements. In addition, locating, extracting and interpreting appropriate patient information from reports can be difficult and time-consuming. Nuance’s cloud-based, AI-powered tools help overcome these challenges by enabling radiologists to more quickly and accurately extract, aggregate, analyze and report on patient data.
“Nuance understands the value-based challenges that radiologists currently face and how to harness technology to address them. When used to augment a radiologist’s work, Nuance’s mPower Clinical Analytics platform can triple the positive impact of recommendation tracking systems,” said Ben Wandtke, M.D., MS, chief of diagnostic imaging, FF Thompson Hospital, Canandaigua, N.Y. “Not only does this cloud-based technology help optimize productivity and efficiency, it also improves compliance and increases technical revenue for radiology practices.”
Leveraging robust data mining algorithms, mPower Clinical Analytics transforms unstructured radiology reports and more quickly provides radiologists access to detailed, actionable information in Nuance’s PowerScribe 360 reports and other clinical data sources. With mPower’s AI-based data mining, radiologists can extract data and actionable insights from radiology reports while driving change based on industry benchmarks and best practices. In addition, mPower can help radiologists:
- Reduce length of stay – Modeling industry best practices, mPower can decrease patient length of stay (LOS) up to three days for patients needing interventional procedures by tracking inpatient recommendations and facilitating care coordination;
- Improve regulatory and billing compliance – By facilitating MIPS and other regulatory reporting, radiologists can optimize billing, reimbursement and outcomes documentation;
- Identify variability in follow-up recommendations – The platform automatically extracts follow-up recommendations from reports, creates detailed profiles for consistency, and enables radiologists to appropriately target and remediate recommendation variability while identifying overdue examinations;
- Increase revenues – By comparing problems, benchmarks and results across the industry, mPower helps practice managers develop and run an operationally efficient organization that profitably delivers effective clinical care;
- Reduce inappropriate imaging – mPower’s data mining algorithms can help identify outliers, guide quality improvement efforts and reduce unnecessary ordering of images; and
- Provide enhanced security – The cloud-based platform is hosted in Microsoft Azure, a HITRUST CSF certified hosting infrastructure, enabling easier upgrades, minimizing service disruptions and reducing total cost of ownership with reduced maintenance costs.
AI empowers radiologists with improved productivity, while reducing their burdensome, tedious tasks. In addition to the mPower Clinical Analytics technology, Nuance showcased its portfolio of AI-powered diagnostic solutions at AHRA, including real-life applications of its AI Marketplace for Diagnostic Imaging. The solution is an open platform for a growing number of developers, data scientists and radiologists to accelerate the development, deployment and adoption of AI for medical imaging.
Attendees visiting Nuance’s booth were able to experience an example of an AI-driven clinical use case for reading and analyzing computed tomography (CT) chest images to detect lung nodules. The use case was offered in collaboration with registered AI Marketplace developers, Aidence and Client Outlook’s eUnity image viewing platform. The demonstration illustrated one example of how AI can be developed and seamlessly integrated into a Nuance-based radiology workflow, augmenting the role of radiologists.
For more information: www.nuance.com
