March 1, 2010 - By empowering healthcare organizations to automatically extract unstructured clinical documentation, healthcare organizations will increase the amount of meaningful data that can be used for clinical decision making, leading to improved patient care and a reduction in overall healthcare costs. Capturing this data will also help collect and report on various diagnostic, quality and safety measures.
As healthcare organizations advance efforts to qualify for "Meaningful Use" reimbursements associated with certified electronic health record (EHR) technology, as outlined in the HITECH Act, a new speech-driven clinical documentation and communication tool aims to support inputting unstructured information in hospital databases. The new solution by Nuance Communications applies Natural Language Processing (NLP) to deliver NLP-powered clinical documentation solutions to help analyze, structure and utilize the more than 80 percent of unstructured clinical documentation that exists in the healthcare industry.
Nuance has acquired key technologies and researchers from Language and Computing, Inc. (L&C), a developer of clinical narrative processing technology. Nuance has also formed a strategic partnership with Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), which will enable Nuance to incorporate MGH’s proven NLP solution, Smart Dictation, into its own solution portfolio for the healthcare market.
By integrating L&C’s NLP technologies into its healthcare portfolio, Nuance will use its line of clinical documentation solutions, including Dragon Medical, eScription, and Dictaphone Enterprise Speech System. With these integrated technologies, Nuance will provide solutions to the healthcare market that enable advanced clinical data warehousing, clinical decision support, data mining, coding for billing and disease management. L&C’s technologies include a medical knowledge base that is specifically designed to extract clinically relevant and discrete data from unstructured medical documentation. L&C technology is currently deployed at major healthcare institutions, including Kaiser Permanente and Ochsner.
As part of Nuance’s broad partnership with MGH, Nuance will exclusively license Smart Dictation NLP, a system that was developed by the MGH Lab of Computer Science, which is currently being used by MGH physicians to automatically extract key data elements from narrative dictations and populate the EHR. Nuance will leverage key capabilities of this technology alongside its full portfolio of NLP and speech-driven clinical documentation solutions to help healthcare organizations convert unstructured text into a structured, digital and interoperable format that contains extracted data elements for a variety of applications.
For more information: www.nuance.com
November 13, 2025 
