Associate Editor for Medical Economics, Physicians Practice

Keith A. Reynolds

Nuance Communications has announced the acquisition of the mobile artificial intelligence company Saykara, Inc., which has developed artificial intelligence (AI) technology to assist physicians and other clinicians with documentation challenges.

, the acquisition continues Nuance’s expansion of market and technical leadership in conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) in an effort to reduce clinician burnout, enhance patient experiences, and improve the financial integrity of the health system overall.

"The complementary technology built by the Saykara team aligns strongly with our technology portfolio and growth strategy as well as the needs of our clients," Joe Petro, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Nuance, says in the release. "This acquisition welcomes some familiar and highly respected technology leaders whom I am excited to have join our research and development team, which consists of the best and brightest minds in applying AI and machine learning to healthcare. With a shared vision, we will continue our aggressive focus on innovation, growth, and on delivering industry-leading AI-powered solutions that meaningfully address the compelling business problems that our healthcare clients and their clinicians face every day."

Founded in 2015 by serial entrepreneur Harjinder Sandhu, who previously served as an executive in Nuance’s research and development division. The company’s team of leading engineers, machine learning experts, and experienced technology executive will join Nuance’s development team, the release says.

"I welcome the opportunity to rejoin the market leader in conversational AI and ambient clinical intelligence, and the impressive Nuance research and development team – especially at this important juncture in the development and adoption of these AI-powered healthcare innovations," Sandhu says in the release. "We are very familiar with Nuance's advanced technology, domain expertise, and world-class technical team and share the company's mission to make what matters to alleviate the clinical documentation burden on clinicians around the world."

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The acquisition of the artificial intelligence company is part of Nuance’s expansion in the field.

Nuance Communications acquires Saykara

If the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has taught the healthcare industry anything, the greatest of these lessons is likely to be that leadership needs to be agile in decision making and keyed into the what their team thinks and need.

In the first general session of the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) Medical Practice Excellence Convention 2020 organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich spoke about how a physician leader with self-awareness can help their team to thrive no matter the circumstances.

Her definition of self-awareness is built on two forms of self-knowledge: one’s understanding of who they are internally and how well one understands how others see them. Both are needed for one to be self-aware.

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Eurich says that she learned over 15 years of coaching CEOs and C-level executives that those leaders who are willing to take a hard look in the mirror and question their assumptions about themselves are always more successful even if they didn’t start out self-aware.

According to her research, self-aware people are:

She says that when it comes to healthcare, self-aware leaders tend to:

And organizations they are a part of deliver higher quality care and have higher patient satisfaction

“What I would encourage you to think about, when you think about this topic from now on, is (self-awareness) is not nice to have, it is a business imperative,” Eurich says.

When seeking to cultivate self-awareness, Eurich says it is good to start with a self-assessment and for people to think about what kind of leader they are. She recommended one should grade one’s self on what kind of leader they are, what kind of friend they are, what kind of a driver they are.

She says that research shows that most people believe that they are above average at all things, which bears little relationship to where they actually stand.

Eurich says one of the biggest barriers to self-awareness is that many people believe they already are self-aware.

“The more we think we are already self-aware, the less self-aware we tend to become,” she says.

To combat this, Eurich suggests something she calls the humility challenge which entails finding one chance to spotlight one’s own imperfections or challenges.

“The micro opportunities to show humility, as many of them as you can do on an ongoing basis really results not only in you being self-aware, but in your team being more effective and engaged,” she says.

When leading a medical practice, especially during the pandemic, Eurich says that external self-awareness, or understanding the way others see you, is slightly more important than internal self-awareness.

To foster this, she recommends getting feedback from a wide variety of team members because most people cannot see the areas in which their awareness falls short. She says it’s safe for most leaders to automatically assume they need to improve their external self-awareness.

In order to avoid unintentional, or well-intentioned, false feedback, Eurich recommends building a small group of people who have one’s best interest at heart and have the courage to tell one the truth especially when it is hard to hear.

Going further than building one’s personal self-awareness, Eurich also recommends building a self-aware team by fostering the same form of honest communication one seeks from their feedback group within the team.

While working on self-awareness can be difficult, Eurich says that it is important to still focus on it despite what all is going on in the world.

“Self-awareness isn’t about these bolts of extreme insight,” she says. “It’s about daily, small, incremental baby steps to get there.”

By building external and group self-awareness, a physician leader can better adapt to the quickly changing healthcare landscape

MGMA 2020: Becoming a future-ready leader through self-awareness

The ongoing COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has led many practices to brink of financial ruin to due to the precipitous drop in patient volumes.

As part of the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) Medical Practice Excellence Conference, which is being held digitally this year, Richard Miller, chief strategy officer at QGenda, gave a presentation entitled “How to Manage Capacity While Adapting to New COVID-19 Processes” aimed at giving practice leaders some 

tips on using technology to ensure they’re fully utilizing their facilities and staff

. Poor capacity management can lead to problems with patient access and throughput, productivity, revenue and cost management, and provider satisfaction.

While the pandemic has increased the need for better capacity management, Miller says that capacity has long been a problem because practice leaders often lack visibility into real-time resource availability, physician burnout continues to grow, organizations are growing, and more practices are balancing increasing healthcare access without increasing costs. With the dawn of the pandemic, these issues have been exacerbated by additional protocols such as changes to the patient flow process, implementing proper social distancing and cleaning guidelines, and transitioning to touch-free contactless operations, Miller says.

Add to this the increased usage of telemedicine and more challenges arise around integrating it into a practice, Miller says.

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“(Telemedicine) can’t just be this thing that sort of runs as an aside, because oftentimes you have providers who work in a hybrid mode, where sometimes they do telemedicine and at other times they’re not,” he says.

While Miller deferred to public health authority guidelines on specific safety concerns within the practice in regard to possible in-practice COVID-19 contamination. But he does suggest implementing digital solutions to make sure that every room and staff member in the practice is used to its full capacity.

Miller says having a centralized digital provider and room scheduling system in place in times of surge gives a practice leader the tools to ensure their facility’s capacity is being fully utilized. The system should be digital, centralized, able to meet unique needs of all physicians in the practice, is dynamic and flexible, and scalable.

Digital systems comply with touch-free contactless operations and provide immediate, real-time access, as well as enables practices to run analytics and better understand their operations. Having the system centralized ensures a single source of information on all resource availability which prioritizes safety, and it enable the sharing and reallocation of resources, Miller says.

Finding systems that meet the unique needs of the physicians in the practice will save time and improve operational efficiency for all parties and will include effort-based coding. Having a system that is dynamic and flexible allows the practice to quickly adaptable to changes in patient demand and will easily incorporate new protocols in scheduling rules, while ensuring the system is scalable limits the risk of running out of capacity when surges or crises occur and when the practice grows.

Miller identified three steps for using scheduling technology to adapt and manage capacity: first is identifying and centralizing resources, second is determining patient access needs and flow, and third is optimizing resources based on capacity and demand using analytics.

A poor capacity management system can lead to unrealized revenue, loss of patients, and increased physician burnout.