Hospital Trust deploys speech recognition technology for outpatient service

Homerton University Hospital NHS Trust has deployed a cloud-based speech recognition technology in an aim to speed up its outpatient service.

The ‘Dragon Medical One’ from Nuance Communications aims to reduce transcription costs and speed up clinical correspondence, allowing time to be freed up for care.

The Trust, which covers 75 different sites in Hackney, East London, decided to use the technology to help cut administrative costs as well as speeding up the turnaround of clinical letters – which took around 17 days to process.

Paul Adams, head of clinical information system at Homerton University Hospital, said: “The Nuance Dragon Medical One speech recognition engine, utilising artificial intelligence, is incredibly fast and accurate - making life for our clinicians easier. 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.

“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.”

The hospital has reduced the turnaround time on clinic letters to two days, while also saving more than £150,000 per year on transcription expenditure.

Now, during outpatient clinics, clinicians can 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.

The cloud-based software-as-a-service solution integrates directly into Homerton’s existing Cerner Millennium electronic patient records (EPR) software.

Dr Simon Wallace, chief clinical information officer at Nuance 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.

“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.”