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Nuance Gives Its Medical Documentation Tech the Microsoft 'Copilot' Treatment
Nuance, maker of AI-powered transcription solutions for healthcare providers, has renamed (and relaunched) a key piece of its portfolio to be more in line with new owner Microsoft's branding.
The Nuance product formerly known as Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) Express is now called DAX Copilot, the company announced in late September. The "Copilot" moniker explicitly marks it as kin to Microsoft's generative AI solutions, which have all been branded "Copilot" (see: Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Copilot in Windows and more).
Microsoft officially acquired Nuance in March 2022 for more than $19 billion, looking to take advantage of the latter's footprint in the healthcare space. Nuance is the steward of the Dragon Medical automated medical dictation platform, which it says has a user base of over 500,000 physicians.
The newly renamed DAX Copilot promises to reduce the time medical professionals spend creating documentation after each patient visit and procedure. It's a "highly accessible entry point" to the broader Dragon portfolio, according to Nuance. The company describes DAX Copilot's purpose this way:
DAX Copilot automatically and securely creates draft clinical summaries of exam room or telehealth conversations in seconds for immediate physician review and entry in the electronic health record (EHR) system. Amplified by the power and scale of the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, DAX Copilot combines Nuance's proven conversational and ambient AI with the newest and most capable generative AI model to improve clinical efficiency and enable clinicians to spend more time caring for patients.
With healthcare organizations plagued by low staff numbers and medical personnel increasingly suffering from burnout, AI can be a useful tool to lift some of the burden off workers. A recent survey by Elsevier Health found that nearly half of medical professionals welcome the use of generative AI tools "to help make clinical decisions."
Nuance positions DAX Copilot as an answer to the problem of medical overwork, saying, "Clinicians using DAX Copilot in a private preview have reported that it has helped them achieve a better work-life balance, higher job satisfaction, more focused, personable, and conversational patient visits, and reduced feelings of burnout and cognitive load."