Protecting those who Protect Us: How Voice Technologies Could Help Ease the Strain on Healthcare Professionals
Dr Simon Wallace, Chief Clinical Information Officer at Nuance Communications
Today the NHS is stretched to breaking point. Our growing and ageing population, an increasing pressure to reform and ever-tightening budget restraints are putting one of our most valuable and essential services under tremendous and unrelenting strain.
It’s the individuals at the heart of the NHS who are feeling this pressure most. In fact, a recent survey by the General Medical Council (GMC) suggests that a quarter of medics feel ‘burned out’, with around half feeling routinely exhausted. Another survey by the NHS discovered that at least a fifth of its staff want to quit.
Stress, heavy workloads and the inability to spend enough time with patients are all having a huge impact on the people behind the NHS. Something needs to change in order for it to not only survive, but thrive.
Chasing the paperless ambition
An increased number of patients generates an increased level of clinical documentation. The responsibility for creating this documentation often falls on the very people who need to be performing the vital services.
A recent study discovered that clinicians were spending, on average, 11 hours a week creating clinical documentation. And, if you factor in lost and repeated documentation, staff could be spending up to 50% of their time on paper-based tasks and clinical documentation processes. In other words, clinicians spend only half of their week doing what really matters: caring for patients. To make matters worse, despite the government’s vision for a paperless NHS by 2020, a recent Freedom of Information request discovered that 9 in 10 trusts are still handwriting patient notes following a consultation.
Although there is no one ‘silver bullet’ to solve burnout, technology – such as speech recognition solutions and voice technologies – could alleviate some of the pressures placed on healthcare professionals and enable them to work more effectively, especially when it comes to the administrative burdens they face.
By deploying voice recognition technologies, healthcare professionals could speed up note capturing as well as other documentation workflows. Given that humans typically speak three times faster than we type, integrating these types of technologies will free up clinicians’ time so they can spend more time seeing patients and delivering quality care.
Speech recognition can also boost the accuracy of patient records by reducing repetition and supporting standardisation across departments. Accurate healthcare records, and therefore good patient care, depend on the level of detail that only high-quality clinical documentation can provide. By enabling clinicians to compile records using just their voice, they can deliver this level of detail and accurately capture the complete patient story at the point of care.
Transforming the doctor-patient relationship
Healthcare professionals are incredibly busy, but their top priority should always patient care. It’s what attracted many of them into the profession, and it’s what enables them to feel more valued and less burnt out. In fact, reports show that good patient care is the primary source of job satisfaction for 79% of clinicians.
Part of improving patient care means improving the patient experience. By building a better doctor-patient relationship, healthcare professionals will not only experience improved job satisfaction but also provide better, more personalised care. It sounds so simple, but the power of human touch and making eye contact cannot be overstated.
But as Electronic Patient Records (EPRs) have become an essential part of the clinical documentation process, doctors have been turning away from their patients to engage with the computer, rather than the patient. AI-assisted speech technology, however, helps doctors remain focused on their patients, whilst also enabling them to both retrieve and create up-to-date clinical knowledge at the point of care.
Using ambient clinical intelligence (ACI), Nuance has created the ‘Clinic Room of the Future’ using a purpose-built healthcare device with a multi-microphone and sensor array. ACI captures the patient’s response as well as that of the clinician. Using voice biometrics, ACI identifies and distinguishes between the human speakers.
The whole conversation is fully diarised and key clinical facts, including problems and orders, are automatically extracted as coded information into a structured note. Once the consultation is finished and saved in the EPR, the completed note is then available to all users on all devices — whenever and wherever it’s most convenient. As well as being faster and more patient-friendly, the whole process reduces the administrative burden on the clinician.
Saving our most valuable asset
Today’s physicians are ready to get back to what matters most to them; caring for patients. To enable them to do that, we must find new ways to help ease the growing burden of administrative responsibilities.
In short, we need to take care of healthcare professionals who take care of us. Speech technology is now at a stage where it can relieve some of the pressures they face. AI-powered documentation solutions have the power to fundamentally enhance and improve the day-to-day wellbeing of healthcare professionals and patients alike.