Microsoft acquiring Nuance is a big deal, pun intended. It’s one of Microsoft’s biggest, most consequential, acquisitions ever and represents one of the largest acquisitions by a Big Tech firm of a major healthcare IT solutions provider.
Nuance (through its myriad products such as Dragon) is used, in some capacity, by most healthcare organizations (hospitals, clinics, post-acute) across the US, so the hope is that Microsoft “does no harm” to Nuance or to its many healthcare users and could, perhaps, even improve things.. Fingers are crossed.
This research (launched and completed in May 2021) focuses on the perspectives of clinicians, and other healthcare decision makers, about what implications exist regarding Microsoft acquiring Nuance.
“They are buying [Nuance] because their own word recognition is not anywhere near as good. Nuance is the industry standard and I love their medical version.”
“Nuance primarily developed dragon dictate, dragon medical, etc. The software could account for regional dialects and pronunciations with surprising accuracy and speed. While apple products have decent voice recognition for everyday use it would pale compared to dragon medical. Since major medical systems use Epic software which practically requires dragon dictate to be functional or efficient for physicians and hospital systems, potential spike in software prices or lack of support or availability could be disastrous and economically unsound for medical care. As a general rule Microsoft rarely buys something to improve or integrate it with their portfolio of products; typically they are trying to take the software out of play or capture the user database for future sales.”
The results make it pretty obvious that, at this stage at least, the healthcare provider market overall is cautiously optimistic that the outcome of Microsoft buying Nuance will be a net positive. The last acquisition in healthcare that had similar positive vibes from the market was when Philips bought Carestream Health. The key will be if Microsoft can translate this goodwill into reality as it integrates Nuance employees and solutions into its massive, global organization. As the immortal Bard once penned – “ay, there’s the rub”…AI continues to rise in importance. When we first started doing this research in 2017, only 65% or organizations felt that AI was important compared to 83% today.
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