Playing a critical role in overseeing day-to-day operations in healthcare, Chief Operating Officers (COOs) need to balance competing priorities and a diverse number of responsibilities. Operations, strategy and administrative tasks all need attention—but digitisation can help across the board.
In part, a hospital COO needs to be an active collaborator at the leadership level. CEOs and CMOs count on the COO to support strategic planning, sharing insights up the chain and implementing their strategies on a more tactical level. At the same time, COOs must be able to shift focus from the ‘big picture’ to the smallest details of how a hospital environment is working, from the way departments collaborate to emergency preparedness and patient data workflow optimisation.
One key priority is meeting the expectations of the Government, including the adoption of Electronic Medical Records. Under NHS England’s plan to digitise services, hospitals and trusts are expected to achieve HIMSS EMRAM Stage 5 by the end of 2025. Part of the globally accepted model for electronic record adoption, this stage will involve effective data integration, and new digital workflows will be key.
With this in mind, COOs often find themselves trying to solve multiple challenges at once—addressing short-term issues while strategically improving organisational operations for the future. Adopting speech recognition – voice driven, AI powered speech-to-text digital dictation – has the potential to address many of these challenges with one investment that provides high returns within months, not years.
Solving major pain points for Chief Operating Officers
By definition, a COO is responsible for the way a hospital operates. That includes just about every facet of day-to-day service delivery, from overall patient experience to resource management, budgets, and even facility management. With so many areas of the hospital competing for attention (and resources), it can be difficult for COOs to know where to start—and where the biggest impact could be delivered.
How can we make the most of limited resources for technology?
Hospital COOs understand the urgent need for transformation more than most. Post-pandemic, it has become clear that stretched resources and overworked healthcare professionals create unnecessary risk. One sudden surge in patient demand could be devastating. In this context, COOs want to invest in technology that delivers widespread improvements—not just for a single department, but across the entire patient journey. Cloud-based speech recognition like Augnito Spectra allows COOs to invest on a small scale in new ways of working, then grow this sustainably and affordably over time. As a result, the time-saving benefits of speech recognition can be incrementally unlocked and these efficiency gains can have an immediate impact across the entire hospital.
How can we eliminate bottlenecks and improve patient throughput?
Process optimisation is a key responsibility for COOs. One way to eliminate delays on the patient journey is to improve workloads, giving teams new ways to work efficiently without compromising on quality and accuracy. Speech recognition and what some call voice driven (AI powered) digital transcription, or voice recognition, helps with this by enabling faster, more accurate and detailed patient data capture, without the need to wait for manual transcription and without the added risk of transcribed errors.
When users can complete clinical reports in less time, they get more done—and get the time and space they need to drive quality and constant improvement in care pathways. This has a positive knock-on effect on hospital resources, treatment waiting lists, transfer processes, and patient journeys.
How can we build a more confident, capable internal culture?
Many hospital COOs face the challenge of improving care-staff relations and fostering a collaborative working environment. The foundation of a good working environment is transparency and clear communication—and speech recognition can help eliminate confusion and ensure everyone can access the information they need.
Integrated into an EPR or other clinical systems, Augnito Spectra doesn’t just make capturing patient and clinical notes easier—it ensures that accurate, timely information is always reflected in the day-to-day systems clinicians depend on. In this way, Augnito strengthens the way teams collaborate, share information, and make informed care decisions.
How can we improve our resilience and agility?
With responsibility for emergency preparedness and facility management, COOs understand the need to build redundancy into ways of working across a hospital. When people are tied to cumbersome on-premise technology, they’re simply unable to respond to change in a way that supports organisational resilience.
Augnito Spectra was designed to go wherever its users go, rather than restricting how they can work. As a cloud-hosted solution, Augnito can be accessed from anywhere, including mobile apps, enabling clinicians to work securely and confidently, even in the event of a disaster, or sudden location changes.
Learn more about Augnito
See how Augnito Spectra delivers measurable benefits now, while future-proofing the way you capture patient data. Request a demo, to see the benefits for yourself.