Above all else, healthcare is about people—the patients we care for and the people who deliver that care, from frontline staff to the senior leadership within an NHS Trust. Any technology is only as impactful as it is useful to those people on a day-to-day basis.
As we kick off a new year, NHS Trusts continue to face the same pressures that have been mounting since the pandemic and, in many cases, even earlier. There is continued pressure for NHS Trusts to meet government plans around patient outcomes, digitalisation, and innovation, but technology can often become an additional burden and a source of complexity.
As a mature technology now enriched by the power of artificial intelligence, smart speech recognition and transcription address the very real pain points felt by leaders across the NHS. Beginning a new series of posts on these roles and pain points, let’s look at some major questions, challenges and priorities faced by Chief Information Officers (CIO), Chief Clinical Information Officers (CCIO) and Chief Nursing Informatics Officers (CNIO)—and how speech can help.
Shared questions, pain points and benefits for technical leaders
While CIO, CCIO and CNIO roles are vastly different in practice, they share similar challenges when it comes to aligning workflows with new technology to enhance employee experience and patient care. Their roles depend on not just bringing in new technology, but also ensuring that technology is tailored to the realities of healthcare, targeted to addressing key pain points, and practical for healthcare professionals to use as part of their daily workflows.
How does technology actually support clinical decisions?
Patient safety and positive outcomes are key to CIOs, CNIOs and CCIOs—any technology must enable more timely or more accurate clinical decisions at the point of care. Highly accurate speech recognition like Augnito is objectively faster and more flexible than slow manual typing or waiting for outsourced transcription, enabling the flow of patient data and enriching decisions with more accurate, complete notes and reports.
How can speech work alongside other systems?
Interoperability between different health IT systems is a key responsibility for CCIOs and CIOs, particularly around integration with often outdated legacy systems. Cloud-based speech recognition can integrate easily with existing Hospital Information Systems (HIS), Electronic Health Records (EHR), and other applications. Crucially, a robust cloud platform like Augnito also offers continuous updates, ensuring interoperability with new systems and applications as they emerge and adoption increases.
Where should a limited budget be focused?
One of the most acute pain points for CIOs, CCIOs and CNIOs—and, indeed, the entire NHS—is a limited IT budget that seems almost contradictory to the governmental pressure to make healthcare more digital. Balancing the need for innovation with financial constraints is a delicate task, but one that a pay-as-you-go cloud-based solution can help with. Significantly, Augnito allows Trusts to scale their usage up and down to meet their requirements and doesn’t require costly changes to your on-premise IT infrastructure. Beyond protecting capital, Augnito also removes the ongoing expense of burdensome management, maintenance, and updates.
How can we drive adoption—and maximise the impact?
CIOs, CCIOs and CNIOs all face huge resistance to new technology, new ways of working, and adoption. Nursing staff may resist adoption new technology due to concerns about disruption; entire organisations may ignore a new tool if they can’t clearly see the benefits for themselves. That’s why we developed Augnito with a relentless focus on ease of use and real-time results. It’s easy to try Augnito on a desktop, laptop, or mobile device, and instantly see the potential of 99.3% accurate speech-to-text. And this simplicity and flexibility creates a positive feedback loop where adoption by some leads to adoption by all—and ultimately a faster return on your investment.
Learn more about Augnito
See how Augnito Spectra delivers measurable benefits now while future-proofing the way you capture patient data. Request a demo or try Augnito Spectra for 7 days and see the benefits for yourself.
