Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) today announced a collaboration with Collective Medical, a PointClickCare company, and the launch of Nuance PowerShare™ Image Aware to provide emergency department (ED) physicians with real-time notifications of a patient’s prior radiology studies within existing clinical workflows.
Point-of-care access to previous diagnostic images reduces unnecessary imaging, healthcare costs, and ED waiting times while expediting diagnosis and treatment for improved outcomes and patient experiences.
Nuance PowerShare Image Aware combines the ubiquitous access and speed of Nuance PowerShare image sharing network and the Collective Platform to notify ED clinicians within seconds when a new patient’s health history and radiology studies are available. It also shows if images and associated metadata are available in PowerShare for viewing, when and where studies were performed, which imaging modality (CT, MRI, etc.) was used, and the area of the body that was imaged. The PowerShare Image Aware capability will also enable radiologists to integrate a patient’s prior imaging into radiology reporting tools such as Nuance PowerScribe, the radiology reporting cloud platform used by 80% of radiologists in the U.S.
“The Nuance PowerShare and Collective Medical networks are highly complementary, HITRUST-certified platforms that address a critical area of need for coordinated care with real-time access to essential diagnostic and patient information,” said Ben Zaniello, MD, MPH, chief medical officer, PointClickCare. “Our goal is to facilitate better decision making and improved clinical outcomes across the healthcare ecosystem, and the scale and ubiquity of the Nuance PowerShare solution enables us to enhance the extensive patient information we deliver with a comprehensive search of prior imaging from all connected PowerShare Image Aware sites across the United States. These deeper insights will enable more informed treatment plans for improved care outcomes and patient experiences.”
CyncHealth, a Great Plains Health Data Utility, is using Nuance PowerShare Image Aware to alert ED physicians in Nebraska and participating healthcare facilities in Iowa of prior imaging studies and reports and to automatically fetch relevant prior images for patients registered in the ED.
Nuance will continue to expand clinical use cases for PowerShare Image Aware, enabling CyncHealth and other healthcare organizations across the country to provide clinicians and patients with secure access to and sharing of diagnostic images to improve care coordination, treatment outcomes, provider satisfaction and patient experiences.
“The combination of the Collective Platform and the Nuance PowerShare network connecting more than 10,000 U.S. healthcare facilities significantly increases real-time access to patient health and diagnostic imaging histories that ED clinicians need to deliver quality care,” said Karen Holzberger, senior vice president and general manager of diagnostic solutions, Nuance. “It also sets the stage for adding information-access and sharing capabilities for ED physicians, clinical use cases for other health system providers, and greater care team collaboration to advance value-based care, patient safety, and improved patient and financial outcomes.”