Nuance Communications and IBM have announced a jooint development effort to advance the use of voice recognition technology in healthcare.

They are working on Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) technologies that will enable healthcare organisations to understand and utilise the unstructured clinical information contained in dictated patient reports.

Nuance and IBM are developing systems that will automatically extract and convert discrete clinical data from clinician-dictated narrative into actionable information that can be used to bring a more evidence-based approach to patient care.

With these advanced CLU technologies integrated into Nuance's suite of front-end and back-end speech recognition solutions, clinicians will be empowered to document via speech recognition into the EHR knowing a CLU-enhanced system can process, identify and extract important clinical data elements such as problems, social history, medications, allergies, and procedures from the free-form narrative text.