London 22nd August 2024 | As the new government continues the vital task of digitising the NHS, flexible speech recognition and evolving scribe technology support the growing trend towards community-based healthcare and services delivered away from hospitals.
While the inbound Labour government is yet to deliver its first budget, the NHS remains in dire need of digital tools that help healthcare professionals stay productive, manage complex workloads, and keep pace with backlogs. The previous government’s pledge of £3.4 billion of funding to support digital transformation reflects the importance of this priority and Labour’s election manifesto highlighted the ambition to ‘build an NHS fit for the future’.
Digital tools will form a key part of this transformation – but Scribetech (UK) Ltd, developers of AI-powered speech recognition platform Augnito, say those tools need to be carefully designed around the needs of healthcare professionals.
“It’s not as simple as saying that digital is always better,” stated Shiraz Austin, Managing Director at Scribetech (UK) Ltd. “Poorly matched digital tools can also be intimidating to healthcare professionals, particularly when the nature of their work means they’re not always in front of a laptop or desktop computer. The ambition to digitise the NHS is a noble one – but it’s critical that no part of the healthcare system is overlooked or short-changed.”
Community-based Nurses (CBNs) are one part of the NHS that is sometimes described as a ‘forgotten service’ despite its unique position as a link between healthcare services and the community. These nurses provide a broad spectrum of care, from dressing wounds and immunisations to education on healthy lifestyles and disease prevention. As a result, they’re able to reduce the burden on GP surgeries and hospitals while simultaneously providing the much-needed preventative care that may help bring costs under control and backlogs down. However, there’s a significant risk that CBNs may be left behind as the rest of the NHS continues its digital transformation. Since their work is out in the community by definition, they need digital tools that are available wherever they go – not just back in the office.
“When nurses are out in the community, they’re often detached from the digital infrastructure that may empower and enable their colleagues,” added Austin. “In many cases, notes are only updated into electronic records hours after a visit – sometimes in a CBN’s own time – and this can lead to inaccuracies and manual errors. Equipping healthcare professionals in the community with tablets, laptops, and other devices can help, but they can also make it harder to create a good rapport with patients in their homes, as they tend to take engagement focus away when data typing is required or app attention is needed. Intuitive speech recognition and ambient scribe technology is an answer we think has a great deal of potential to digitise these community interactions in a way that doesn’t become a barrier to human connections.”
Augnito Spectra is Scribetech’s purpose-built AI-powered speech recognition platform, designed and developed in partnership with healthcare professionals. The solution offers 99.9% accurate speech recognition on any device – from laptops and tablets to smart-phones – with no need for time-consuming voice profile training or having different user and login accounts on each system. Crucially, Augnito Spectra makes intuitive speech recognition available anywhere community-based nurses go, with captured notes fed directly back into Electronic Health Record (EHR) and other clinical systems.
For a simple recurring monthly fee with no need for capital investment, this creates an immediate way for Trusts to digitise the CBN workflow without asking nurses to spend all their time typing.
“Accurate speech recognition is faster than typing,” concluded Austin, “but that’s just the beginning. We’re not just helping healthcare professionals in the community spend less time on reporting, but we’re also connecting those notes and reports from the field back to other clinical systems. In this way, we’re bringing community healthcare into the same digital ecosystem as every other team, ultimately improving the timeliness of healthcare data, enabling more accurate decisions, and accelerating the patient journey. Our soon to be launched Augnito Ambient will complete our evolved scribe technology and move us a step closer to a holistic connected health tech solutions offering for primary care in practices to acute care in hospitals, to specialist clinician consultants and to the not forgotten community-based nurses and mental healthcare professionals.