Nuance unveils advanced PowerScribe AI features at RSNA

At the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, Nuance showcased future workflow-integrated generative artificial intelligence capabilities for its voice-enabled reporting platform PowerScribe, which have the potential to further automate complex workflows and everyday tasks and surface important details from text and pixels to get. and identify missing information.

WHY IT MATTERS
The latest 2023 American Society of Radiologic Technologists Staffing and Workplace Survey shows vacancy rates of more than 18% have reached their highest level in two decades, according to an announcement from Nuance this week.

To improve radiologists' workflows by accelerating reading and reporting, Mass General Brigham and Quantum Radiology tested the expanded capabilities of Nuance's generative AI radiology copilot, PowerScribe Smart Impression.

Nuance says these users report that interpretation speed has improved thanks to the technology, saving up to one minute at a time.

“Based on our experience with third-party automatic printing features, PowerScribe Smart Impression effectively redefines what radiologists can expect from AI-powered reporting solutions,” said Dr. Keirsun Crockett, Quantum Radiology, in the statement.

Crockett said the company has licensed all 83 radiologists.

“It's very useful because it consistently generates wording that is exactly what I would say.”

Radiologists are suffering from high burnout rates due to the workforce crisis and the volume of their work. Their reported burnout rate increased from 49% in 2022 to 54%, according to the Medscape 2023 Physician Burnout & Depression Report.

“Radiologists must make timely decisions and generate reports that guide their subsequent clinical care in dozens of cases every day, and the cognitive burden of an increasing workload can have major consequences,” said Dr. Bernardo Bizzo, senior director at Mass General. Brigham's AI-focused business office.

“Generative AI tools can provide great value to our field by alleviating some of the burden on radiologists by automatically composing impressions as we are used to, avoiding common errors and reminding them of important information that needs to be recorded.”

THE BIG TREND
PowerScribe is a widely used reporting solution, and Nuance started integrating AI into diagnostics and decision support in 2018. The cloud-hosted platform is known for its use of natural language processing, image characterization, speech recognition, intelligent structured data exchange and more.

In 2021, Microsoft acquired Nuance for almost $20 billion.

“Nuance provides the AI ​​layer at the point of care and is a pioneer in the real-world application of business AI,” said Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft.

Many healthcare systems are implementing AI technologies to help radiologists improve the speed and accuracy of their work.

Dr. Melissa A. Davis, associate professor of radiology and biomedical imaging and vice chair for imaging informatics, radiology and biomedical imaging at Yale New Haven, said the health care system is using AI to evaluate CTs of the head without contrast and increase scan review time.

“Integration was a key aspect of this implementation,” she said Healthcare IT news in October.

“The solution needed to integrate seamlessly with existing radiology workflow systems. Embedding an icon in the worklist to indicate when AI had flagged a case enabled easy adoption and use of the technology.”

ON THE RECORD
“Just as we have done with our Dragon Medical portfolio of clinical documentation solutions, including the new Dragon Ambient eXperience Copilot, Nuance and Microsoft are accelerating the development of generative AI-powered capabilities for radiology, starting with PowerScribe Smart Impression,” said Calum Cunningham , senior vice president and general manager of diagnostic imaging at Nuance.

“It advances the state-of-the-art of radiology reporting and gives radiologists fully integrated tools that can deliver meaningful improvements in radiology reporting efficiency and physician satisfaction, without changes to the platform users have relied on for decades.”