Isle of Wight NHS Trust: Speech Recognition

Isle of Wight NHS Trust increases clinician satisfaction, improves turnaround and saves costs with cloud-based, AI-powered Speech Recognition...

Background

Isle of Wight NHS Trust is the only integrated acute, community, mental health and ambulance health care provider in England. Established in April 2012, the Trust provides a full range of health services to an isolated offshore population of 140,000.

Based at the heart of the Island, St Mary’s Hospital in Newport previously used a mix of dictation methods including analogue tapes, and standalone digital dictation equipment. Problems identified with these processes included delays in processing letters affecting the turnaround. This meant that the Trust was spending money on agency staff to assist with letter backlogs. Staff were spending too much time on administrative tasks, including the manual transcription of dictations, and were subsequently not able to dedicate sufficient, quality time to dealing with patient issues.

The Trust sought to upgrade their archaic tape dictation system with one that could be easily adopted by clinicians and medical secretaries, and leveraged to improve service provision to patients by reducing the backlog of dictations. As with many Trusts, this is an urgent issue to address due to the nature of the healthcare service. Timely access to information is crucial for providing timely treatment to patients; and the legacy dictation systems were presenting major issues with the quality of the recordings, which affected the accuracy of medical records, as well as turnaround.

An objective was set to reduce the amount of time medical secretaries spend on transcription. Other objectives included the employment of a streamlined and cost-effective secretarial process system that would eliminate both backlogs and the requirement for agency staff; an outpatient correspondence process that would turnaround letters within the appropriate clinical timescales (5 days), and enhance clinician satisfaction and secretarial service that would improve the patient experience.

The Trust insisted the solution came from a proven supplier with enough skill and resources to manage a major project, with technology designed for both current and future healthcare
needs. It was specified that the chosen technology be fully operational and achieve an immediate high level of medical-specific speech recognition.

Solution

T-Pro Dictate is a versatile, cloud-based Digital Dictation, Speech Recognition and clinical correspondence solution designed to provide staff with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface enabling them to easily create, track, transcribe and manage workloads centrally.

With T-Pro’s fully integrated, speech recognition engine, clinicians use their voice to securely capture the patient's story more naturally and efficiently - anywhere, anytime. With a single unified voice profile, clinicians can get up and running quickly across clinical workflows, care settings, devices, and apps. This provides a seamless, consistent, and personalised experience which supports the natural and individual workflows of clinicians.

• Secure, accurate and mobile speech recognition
• No voice profile training required
• Capture patient story at any PC or while on the move
• Dictate using a microphone, handheld recorder, telephone or mobile device
• Select from a patient list (pulled from PAS), which pre-populates templates with the patient and visit information
• Self-edit and sign clinic letter or send to transcription for review and editing
• Feature set designed to maximise the efficiency of proofreading and editing; words are highlighted as playback is controlled with foot-pedal
• Changes made in the editor are sent back to the T-Pro speech engine for learning and improved accuracy over time
• Personalised clinical vocabularies and templates can be accessed and shared across the Trust
• Voice command capabilities for editing, and boiler-plate text insert capabilities
• Rapidly check and electronically sign/approve letters
• Intelligent routing and interfacing with PAS and EMR, and subsequent transmission of letters electronically to the GP

Benefits

T-Pro’s in-house integration team was available to offer expert assistance in the design and development of interfaces with the Trust’s PAS (Clinicom) and EMR (CGI’s e-Care Logic), which enables T-Pro to handle all the stages of the documentation process - from creation to automatic distribution of letters, and every step in between. Deep integration also allowed the Trust to leverage their existing systems, and create seamless workflows for users, and automate complex workflows that refocus staff towards more high-value tasks.

Transcribing a clinic letter previously would take a medical secretary approximately 5 minutes - with T-Pro speech recognition, it takes a matter of seconds. Over the course of one week, the Trust was able to save hours of valuable time and cut down on expensive, manual transcription time and empower clinical staff to work more efficiently. Time spent on transcription has reduced dramatically. The number of letters that secretaries are able to process per month has doubled and significant improvements in turnaround time have been felt across departments.

Key Outcomes

T-Pro speech recognition is easy to use, with minimal training required, taking as little as 5 minutes so that staff can stay productive. Rosie Oliver, Assistant Operations Manager, commented: “Once the technology was put in front of our staff, they immediately saw the benefits and how easy it is to use. The training received from the T-Pro team was exceptional, and meant that we were up and running very quickly”.

What’s more, T-Pro Speech is highly accurate and flexible. Speaker-independent, AI-driven speech recognition means there is no voice profile training required and users have a highly accurate speech recognition conversion tool, right out of the box. Clinicians can dictate while using any modern web browser or mobile device and efficiently capture the complete patient story. With options to self-edit and finalise letters in real-time or send to a medical secretary to review and edit the transcribed text, clinicians have the power of choice in their hands.

In addition to the efficiency gains, T-Pro’s subscription-based pricing makes it easier for the Trust to plan budgets with little upfront capital investment and predictable expenses. The Trust has also realised cost savings through a reduction in overtime. Oliver adds:

“Since the implementation of T-Pro, we have already been able to save thousands in overtime expenses associated with managing the dictation backlog. Also, with T-Pro’s mobile dictation app, there are no costly replacement recording devices and analogue tapes to buy (£22,066 had been spent in the previous two years). The savings have been invested into direct clinical care, focused on improving clinical outcomes.”

The implementation of T-Pro at Isle of Wight NHS Trust was more than just your standard run-of-the-mill software implementation. Rather, this was a product of several teams coming together to work towards a common goal: to provide the Trust with an efficient system that has high usability, will improve turnaround and enable clinicians to spend less time on documentation and focus more on patient care.

“T-Pro is a great partner. After working together, it truly feels like we are all part of the same team and not a client-vendor relationship. We are always collaborating on new ideas that can aid the documentation process, and look forward to many more years of innovation”, added Oliver.