East London’s Homerton NHS Trust has reimagined outpatient services and improved patient care following deployment of clinical speech recognition software from Nuance.
Homerton, based in Hackney, East London, provides a wide range of health services in a hospital and community setting with staff working out of 75 different sites across the borough. It 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 Nuance’s 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 per 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 clinic letters they can give to their patients and send electronically to the GP before the patient leaves the clinic. Patients then benefit from faster, 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 Nuance Dragon Medical One speech recognition engine, utilising artificial intelligence, is incredibly fast and accurate – making life for our clinicians easier,” Paul Adams, Head of Clinical Information System at Homerton University Hospital said. “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,” he added.
“Future-proofing such investments has always been critical to us. 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,” Adams said.
“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,” Dr Simon Wallace, Chief Clinical Information Officer, Nuance, said.
“We worked with the in-house training team to onboard health staff with Dragon Medical One, enabling healthcare staff to develop patient records instantaneously through their speech, build fuller and more accurate reports, as well as freeing up medical secretaries to enhance patient flow and communications,” he added.