UPMC, Nuance Partner to Develop Speech and Understanding Solutions

UPMC, a $9 billion global health enterprise based in Pittsburgh, Pa. with more than 50,000 employees, and Nuance Communications Inc., (Burlington, Mass.) today announced a multi-year, multi-million-dollar innovation collaboration, in which the two industry leaders will develop Medical Intelligence solutions as a means to transform the way patient information is captured, understood and used by caregivers. The goal is to improve the quality and efficiency of care by creating a more complete and accurate electronic medical record (EMR), first across UPMC and then more broadly across the healthcare industry.

Nuance and UPMC have signed a 10-year joint development agreement under which they will create speech and clinical language understanding (CLU)-enabled technologies. Representing a new class of innovation in the world of health information technology and natural language processing, Medical Intelligence solutions from Nuance and UPMC will transform clinical data into actionable information that can be used to drive smarter clinical, business and compliance decisions. Currently, most medical data is captured as unstructured free text and cannot be easily analyzed.

UPMC is widely known and respected for its medical and technological expertise and its innovative partnerships with such industry leaders as Alcatel-Lucent, IBM, and GE Healthcare.

The partnership between Nuance and UPMC also comprises an extensive technology and services license agreement in which UPMC will standardize on Nuance’s Best in KLAS healthcare IT solutions at more than 20 hospitals, 30 imaging centers and more than 400 outpatient sites. After an extensive competitive evaluation process, UPMC selected Nuance as its enterprise-wide partner for speech and natural language processing solutions.