Homerton NHS Trust reimagines outpatient services
Nuance’s Dragon Medical One speech recognition technology helps free up clinicians' time
Homerton University Hospital NHS Trust has deployed Nuance Communications’ Dragon Medical One cloud-based speech recognition technology, significantly reducing transcription costs, speeding up clinical correspondence, and freeing up time to care.
We’ve seen considerable month-on-month cost savings as we replace our transcription services with front-end speech recognition and we’ve also reduced expenditure by not having to invest in additional hardware or recruit scarce and expensive technical resources
The trust deployed Nuance to tackle the issue of ballooning administrative costs, as well as a slow turnaround time of clinical letters, which took around 17 days to process.
With the new medical speech recognition technology on board, which enables clinicians to create patient records using just their voice, the hospital has reduced the turnaround time on clinic letters to just two days, while also saving more than £150,000 a year on transcription expenditure.
Now, during outpatient clinics, clinicians can even enter their notes into the electronic patient record at the point of care, creating letters they can give to their patients and send electronically to the GP before the patient leaves the appointment.
Patients then benefit from faster, more-personalised communication and there are few lost or missed appointments.
The improved process has also freed up secretaries to focus on patient contact rather than having to try to get on top of typing a backlog of handwritten notes.
The cloud-based software-as-a-service solution integrates directly into Homerton’s existing Cerner Millennium electronic patient records (EPR) software and plays a key role as part of the hospital’s paperless working drive.
“The speech recognition engine, utilising artificial intelligence, is incredibly fast and accurate, making life for our clinicians easier,” said Paul Adams, head of clinical information system at Homerton University Hospital.
“We’ve seen considerable month-on-month cost savings as we replace our transcription services with front-end speech recognition and we’ve also reduced expenditure by not having to invest in additional hardware or recruit scarce and expensive technical resources to run the software day-to-day.
“Futureproofing such investments has always been critical to us. And, as we’ve deployed Nuance through the cloud, we will benefit from continuous updates and our clinicians will have instant access to, and can take advantage of, new features and enhancements as soon as they are released.”
Dr Simon Wallace, chief clinical information officer at Nuance, added: “Homerton plays a critical role in the local community, delivering care services both inside and outside of the hospital. Its staff are often on the move and it needed an improved workflow and process for developing patient documentation in a timely and accurate manner.”
