Industry round-up: digital dictation

This special edition of eHealth Insider’s industry round up focuses on the latest contracts and deployments in the digital dictation and speech recognition sector.

East Cheshire completes trust wide digital dictation

SRC has completed a trust wide roll out of its Winscribe digital dictation system at East Cheshire NHS Trust, where it has been deployed to more than 400 users across 21 departments. The system supports the trust’s ‘Lean’ initiative, by automating dictation and transcription processes and speeding up the production of urgent clinical letters.

Clinicians can mark priority dictations as urgent and track the progress of work, while the Winscribe software automatically distributes dictations to secretaries. Annabelle Lowe, a medical secretary at the trust said: “Soon we will be able to type the letters even before the patient is seen. We are finding everything so much faster, which means it is better for both us and the patients.”

Golden Jubilee reduces turnaround times in four months

The Golden Jubilee National Hospital in Scotland has said that all its medical correspondence is now being dispatched in less than 12 hours; four months after implementing WinVoicePro from Voice Technologies. The software provides electronic document review, multiple sign off options for discharge, and systems integration.

In addition to improving document approval times, WinVoicePro has also enabled Golden Jubilee to start creating an electronic patient data warehouse, in which final patient documents are securely stored alongside diagnostic test results and lab reports. The electronic repository means approved staff have access to patient information that was often previously stored locally. The technology also enables Golden Jubilee to link with the Scottish Care Information Store (SCI Store), where a copy of each document is made available for sharing with other NHS Boards in Scotland.

Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt roll out BigHand digital dictation

Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic and District Hospital NHS Trust has started rolling out a BigHand digital dictation solution to 200 staff. Maggie Durrant, service improvement facilitator, said the workload of secretaries and document turnaround times vary across the trust, and the improved monitoring and reporting mechanisms in the BigHand system would help it to produce benchmarking statistics to support a review of processes.

The trust is also implementing BigHand’s Clinical Builder module to reduce the time clinicians spend titling dictations. Clinic Builder uses data from the trust’s patient administration system to generate a list of pre-populated, profile dictations. Clinician’s can then dictate letters against specific patients so each dictation is automatically titled and profiled with the correct information with a single click.

SRC rolls out digital dictation at Whipps Cross

SRC is rolling out digital dictation at Whipps Cross University Hospital in London. The company worked on pilot schemes in orthopaedics and gastroenterology and is now offering the system to clinical teams across the trust, where it has been taken up in cardiology, diabetes, ENT, histopathology and neurology.

The system, which is based on Winscribe software, is integrated into the McKesson Total Care patient administration system, using HL7. This allows documents to be generated and filled with patient details automatically when a secretary opens a dictation. Some consultants are also using SRC speech recognition to draft their own letters.