New medical dictation software promises speedy production of clinical notes

Nuance Communications, Inc., a producer of speech recognition software, has announced what could be an important advance in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to produce notes for clinical documentation.

Microsoft-owned Nuance recently unveiled Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) Express, an enhancement to its DAX medical dictation software. In a news release, the company describes DAX Express as a clinical documentation application that combines conversational and ambient AI with OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4. The result is an application that can create draft clinical notes immediately following an in-person or telehealth visit, according to the release.

Nuance calls the development of DAX Express a milestone in its “long-standing mission to reduce administrative burden and empower clinicians to spend more time taking care of patients and less time on paperwork.”

"Nuance and Microsoft came together with the goal of helping to digitally transform healthcare, and today we are marking the next step forward in the ongoing evolution of AI-powered solutions for overburdened care providers," Nuance CEO Mark Benjamin said in the release.

Combining DAX Express with the existing DAX and Dragon Medical One products will “reduce cognitive burden and help increase the joy of practicing medicine,” Nuance says.

The company says it will showcase DAX Express at this year’s HIMSS conference, and make it available for private preview this summer.