Vanderbilt combines AI and Smart on FHIR in an EHR voice assistant

Vanderbilt University Medical Center is one of the first provider organizations to develop a voice assistant for electronic health records that can give verbal summaries back to providers using natural language processing. With VEVA, the Vanderbilt EHR Voice Assistant, the health system is using NLP artificial intelligence from Nuance to help interpret voice requests, and HL7's SMART on FHIR standard to pull pertinent data and provide relevant summaries. "We also are consulting with Epic, which is developing a voice assistant application that can retrieve and display some relevant patient information such as labs, notes and vitals," said Dr. Yaa Kumah-Crystal, core design advisor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. "Epic’s voice assistant will also have some medication ordering functionality in future releases."