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

WHY IT MATTERS
The most recent 2023 American Society of Radiologic Technologists Staffing and Workplace Survey found that vacancy rates topping 18% are at a 20-year high, according to an announcement from Nuance this week.

To improve radiologist workflows by accelerating reading and reporting, Mass General Brigham and Quantum Radiology have been testing the expanded capabilities in Nuance's generative AI radiology copilot, PowerScribe Smart Impression.

Nuance said these users report enhanced interpretation speed with the technology – saving up to one minute per read.

"Based on our experience with auto-impression features from other vendors, PowerScribe Smart Impression effectively redefines what radiologists should expect from AI-powered reporting solutions," Dr. Keirsun Crockett, Quantum Radiology, said in the statement.

Crockett said the company licensed it for all 83 of its radiologists.

"It's really helpful because it consistently generates wording that is exactly what I would say."

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

"Radiologists must make high-stakes, timely decisions in dozens of cases each day and generate reports that guide their downstream clinical care, and the cognitive burden of increasing workloads can have great consequences," said Dr. Bernardo Bizzo, senior director at Mass General Brigham's AI-focused business office.

"Generative AI tools may offer great value to our field by lightening some of the burdens placed on radiologists by automatically drafting impressions the way we are used to, helping avoid common mistakes and reminding of important information to include."

THE LARGER TREND
PowerScribe position is a widely used reporting solution and Nuance began incorporating AI in diagnostics and decision support in 2018. The cloud-hosted platform is known for using natural language processing, image characterization, speech recognition, intelligent exchange of structured data and more.

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

"Nuance provides the AI layer at the healthcare point of delivery and is a pioneer in the real-world application of enterprise AI," said Satya Nadella, Microsoft chairman and CEO.

Many health 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 system uses AI to help evaluate CTs of the head without contrast and boost scan review time.

"Integration was a key aspect of this implementation," she told Healthcare IT News in October.

"The solution had to seamlessly integrate 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 empowers radiologists with fully integrated tools that can produce meaningful improvements in radiology reporting efficiency and physician satisfaction without changes to the platform users have relied on for decades."