Doctors Studying Ways to Get Virtual Assistants Into the Exam Room

Nuance Communications has integrated its Dragon Medical Virtual Assistant with Epic Systems’ electronic health records. The work with natural language processing is showing promise in helping ease some burdens of working with EHR systems. Dr. Yaa Kumah-Crystal, MD, MPH (pictured), is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., where she sees patients in pediatric endocrinology. She spends most of her time doing research in medical informatics and health IT, on “how to optimize and make the EHR [Electronic Health Record] less of a burden on end users and figuring out how to best leverage the technology and make patient care better.”