A key member of a hospital’s leadership team, Chief Finance Officers (CFOs) are responsible for the capital health of the organisation. However, their financial choices, planning and budgeting also affect the health of individuals and the wider population.
In a typical hospital, CFOs strive for financial stability through effective planning, reporting, and strategic decision making. From cashflow to contract negotiations, CFOs ensure that financial resources are used effectively to deliver the best possible levels of care and seamless patient journeys.
In recent years, the financial pressure on hospitals and NHS Trusts has intensified. Rising demand, increasing costs, an ageing population, and funding shortfalls all create new challenges for CFOs everywhere. The Health Foundation expects these factors to worsen over time. In this context, CFOs must constantly balance competing priorities—and invest in new technology in a way that delivers the best possible return.
Solving major pain points (for Chief Finance Officers)
Efficiency is an overarching priority for CFOs. Driven by robust cash releasing efficiency targets from the Government, every CFO needs to improve processes, meaningfully reduce operating costs, and still maintain the highest standards of quality and care. This all needs to be achieved while ensuring healthcare professionals feel supported, both financially and in terms of workflow. The cost of 2023’s NHS strikes is an estimated £1.5 billion and the impact on operating costs and patients is hard to measure in financial terms.
While there is no single solution for a hospital’s complex operational needs, we’re confident that investment in clinical speech recognition delivers measurable value to staff and patients —without restricting the agility and financial clarity CFOs need in order to keep pace with a changing market.
Reducing overheads and increasing efficiency
At the most fundamental level, highly accurate clinical speech recognition is more affordable than manual transcription services or adding headcount to keep up with medical administration demand. When healthcare professionals can capture accurate patient notes and reports faster and more intuitively, they can work more efficiently—in short, the same number of ‘heads’ can complete a larger number of reports in the same amount of time.
Equally, cloud-based medical speech recognition like Augnito Spectra helps keep costs down by removing the need to overhaul IT infrastructures, spend capital for on-premise hardware, or employ IT teams to conduct application maintenance and upgrades.
Leveraging the investments in legacy technology already made
New technology including clinical speech recognition can also help CFOs drive even more value from the investments they’ve already made in digitisation. With an exhaustive SDK and API, Augnito’s AI platform can be easily and seamlessly integrated into any clinical system, including Electronic Patient Records (EPR). This allows 99.9% accurate speech recognition to be embedded into existing workflows, making even older software faster, easier, and more intuitive to use. Augnito can bridge legacy technology with new functionality now, without the cost of replacement—and continue to integrate with new technology when the Trust is financially and operationally ready to adopt it.
Making investments now to deliver lasting value
Amid widespread economic uncertainty, it’s difficult for CFOs to support strategic investments in new technology unless they can validate the likelihood of long-term value. A cloud hosted speech recognition platform like Augnito Spectra is scalable by design, ensuring its time-saving benefits can easily be extended to new individuals, new teams, and any location. Augnito has the flexibility to support site-wide expansion over time.
Augnito also delivers continuous improvement through machine learning, resulting in a solution that perpetually improves, even as new medical vocabulary comes into use. With a self-improving cloud solution, there’s no need to rethink, replace, and reinvest in something new in a few years.
Improving organisational agility
Finally, the only effective way to navigate economic uncertainty and unpredictable spikes in demand is with agility and flexibility. CFOs know that long-term financial commitments only diminish their ability to flex in order to meet the market, the needs of the workforce, government priorities, and population health requirements.
Augnito enables agility in an individual sense—by making speech recognition available anywhere, on any device—but also in an organisational sense, with simple recurring costs, no need to spend your capital, and options to shrink or grow your usage as required. Augnito is designed to accommodate fluctuations in staffing levels with localised user license administration for full control and options to recycle licenses for new users.
Learn more about Augnito
See how Augnito Spectra creates lasting value for hospital CFOs. Request a demo, to see the benefits for yourself.