[London, 6 June 2024] – With deep, hassle-free, integration, Augnito is enabling continued transformation in radiology and supporting key solutions that will be showcased at UKIO 2024.

Taking place from 10th-12th June 2024 in Liverpool, the UK Imaging and Oncology (UKIO) congress is where leaders from across radiology come together to share best practice, discuss trends, undertake professional development, and learn about the latest state-of-the-art equipment and technology. The 2024 event will focus on the theme of ‘Vision and Values: Putting People First’.

Thanks to robust partnerships and extensive integration with leading platforms, Augnito speech recognition from Scribetech will be present at the event for the fourth year running.

“Nothing is more important to us than elevating fields across healthcare, and radiology is a particular focus,” stated Shiraz Austin, Managing Director at Scribetech (UK) Ltd and Co-Founder of Augnito. “Augnito Spectra, our own highly convenient frontend across desktop and mobile, is part of this approach, but integration is equally important. Technology providers understand the potential of speech recognition as an accessible way for healthcare to leverage the potential of AI. Our partnerships with award-winning providers using Augnito Voice Services to speech enable their platforms is key to how, together, we can bring the benefits of speech recognition to more radiologists.”

One of the solutions carrying Augnito Voice Services embedded inside is Intelerad’s InSight PACS,  adopted by over 250 NHS and private healthcare providers across the UK and Ireland. In February 2024, InSight PACS was recognised as a 2024 Best in KLAS: Global Software Report award winner. Crucially, this award was based on feedback from the solution’s users – the people who rely on radiology reporting technology every day.

Austin stated: “Clinical system developers and cloud imaging solution providers appreciate Augnito for its API and SDK allowing them to seamlessly add Voice Services to their offering. We’ve taken one-of-a-kind speech recognition, developed in partnership with clinicians, and made it easy to integrate into any existing diagnostics and radiology reporting platform. But what drives us is the response from radiologists. People have reported significant time savings, faster reports, and increased accuracy – all these benefits lead to smoother patient journeys and better outcomes. That’s what matters.”

Augnito is also integrated into Hexarad: Radiology Technology Innovator of the Year in the M&A Today Global Awards 2024. Hexarad was also awarded the Silver HSJ Partnership Award for Diagnostics Project of the Year for its partnership with the North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust. This project led to estimated time savings of up to 80 minutes per patient. Meanwhile, teleradiologists reporting on behalf of the trust received images within 25 minutes compared to 45 minutes using the previous system.

Representatives from these leading imaging solutions award winners will be attending UKIO 2024, (Hexarad), and exhibiting (Intelerad) alongside other high profile Scribetech partners using Augnito to speech-enable their systems. Exhibitors include Aptvision Ltd – with their e-referral portal, delivering better patient outcomes and reducing workloads for medical staff, CIMAR UK Ltd – who has recently joined forces with NHS England to deliver the AI Development Platform Pilot at Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust that will then enable the deployment of AI in medical imaging across the NHS, Fujifilm Healthcare UK – has integrated Augnito into its Universal Reporting module and will be showing this at UKIO, as well as new ultrasound imaging innovations and live demonstrations on its DeepInsight AI technology, Magentus – with a new Managing Director at their UK helm and a team supporting more than 25 million imaging events each year across 700+ locations with its Cris Radiology Information System, and OpenRad Services UK Ltd – showcasing its cloud-based Augnito speech-enabled remote reporting platform that includes the functionalities of a PACS, RIS and diagnostic 3D visualisation as distinct subscription packages with secure access from anywhere and from any device.

This significant presence at UKIO reflects the continued growth of Augnito AI powered speech recognition across radiology.

Scribetech is also a member of AXREM, the UK trade association for suppliers of imaging and healthcare equipment. This gives the company insight into the current and emerging needs of radiologists and imaging professionals and helps ensure that its voice-driven AI powered and cloud based solution, Augnito, remains relevant, impactful and evolving in pace with demand.

“This will be the fourth year running, since launching Augnito technology, that it is being shown at UKIO through our partners,” added Austin. “And while Scribetech has been an approved NHS solutions provider for over two decades, we brought Augnito to the UK market as a disruptive technology because our vision was to democratise the use of speech recognition across the continuum of care. We knew Augnito provided the value advantage – a better and more cost effective way for healthcare professionals to leverage the cloud and AI, to easily transform their patient data workflows. Now, 30 months later, we’re supporting more than 2,000 UK radiologists who have switched to Augnito – through our partnerships – and many others directly. We couldn’t agree more with this year’s UKIO theme and message ‘Vision and Values: Putting People First’. The positive effect that the impact Augnito is having on radiologists, and on patient imaging and diagnostics reporting speaks for itself. ”

ENDS

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Notes to editors
All company names and product names listed in this press release are trademarks and registered trademarks of their respective owners.

About Scribetech (UK) Ltd and Augnito
Scribetech (UK) Ltd is a clinical solutions innovator and official distributor of Augnito products in the UK and Ireland. The company co-developed Augnito with its sister company Augnito India Private Ltd fusing 20 years of highly accurate and secure transcription and digital dictation services to the NHS, speech-to-text, and clinical coding solutions for the healthcare sector, and its own Deep Neural Network speech recognition engine with advanced voice AI technology. Augnito provides a secure, cloud-based, voice-driven AI clinical speech recognition product suite, offering fast, easy ways to capture live clinical data on any device with 99% accuracy, support for multiple medical specialities, and no need for voice profile training. Augnito brings cost effective, seamless speech recognition to daily workflows and third-party clinical systems, quickly turning medical information into documentation that makes healthcare intelligence compliant and accessible where it is needed.

Much like the entire healthcare system, mental health services in the NHS and wider community are facing unprecedented pressure. Rising demand, increased awareness, and stretched budgets make diagnosing and treating mental health conditions a considerable challenge. 

It’s an urgent issue that affects everyone. Last year, mental health patients in Accident & Emergency departments waited more than 5.4 million hours. Vulnerable groups like pregnant women aren’t receiving the care they need—not because of a lack of funding, but because of overwhelmed workforces and chronic understaffing. And those people who do receive treatment are significantly less likely to be satisfied with their experience than those with physical conditions.

Technology like AI and speech recognition has the potential to raise standards of mental health care. For example, recent studies show how speech recognition could be used to detect the signs of depression. However, despite recent advances in AI and natural language processing, there’s just no substitute for the distinct, empathetic role of a mental health professional (MHP).

Mental health specialists routinely go above and beyond to capture the often lengthy context around a patient’s condition. It’s a significant drain on already exhausted medical professionals and Allied Health Professionals (AHPs), not just during the day, but out of hours and during valuable home time. It’s here that technology can be most impactful, not replacing professionals, but enabling them to work more flexibly and focus on what matters most: their patients and their personal time.

A flashpoint for mental health care

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted mental health for the worse, with numerous sacrifices made to combat the virus and widespread uncertainty. Society as a whole saw a groundswell in dormant or entirely new mental health conditions. Mental health professionals were faced with even more work—only completed thanks to their commitment/passion for their work, and a great deal of time and effort.

This mental health crisis led to what former Health and Social Care Secretary Sajid Javid described as ‘a decade of change in just two years.’ This quote from a Mental Health Summit speech reflects both the rapid increase in mental health conditions—but also a rapid shift in priorities for the government.

Unfortunately, two years of rapid change can’t undo the damage of decades of underfunding. In January 2023, the UK government pledged £150 million to support urgent mental health care, but health and care providers are already dealing with chronic understaffing. Data from Mind shows that, as far back as 2013, four in ten mental health trusts had staffing levels below benchmarks. More recent reports from the British Medical Association show that the mental health workforce has had little growth in the decade since.

While more investment in mental health provision is welcome, it must be targeted appropriately—and applied consistently. Building highly qualified capacity takes time. Improving the mental health landscape will be a long, arduous process. Those patients suffering with mental health conditions can’t wait for Trusts to find, hire, and grow their resources and human expertise.

Investing in mental health professionals (MHPs)

Investment in patient-facing services will always be vital to transformation, but there’s also a significant opportunity to invest in the capacity that’s already there. This starts with understanding and supporting the overworked mental health teams on the frontlines of the patient experience.

Reported by the CQC, 45% of patients aren’t always given enough time to discuss their needs. This reflects a department under pressure—and that’s pressure that the right technology can alleviate.

The work of mental health professionals is notoriously complex. The role is wide and varied. And professionals need to be multiskilled in providing advice and counselling, behavioural management, and developing strategies for patients to manage their thoughts and emotions. Amid these considerable demands, unwieldy software and slow reporting processes negatively affect quality of care. This is a particularly big challenge in mental health, where collaboration across practitioners is so vital. In an effort to accurately capture the insights a colleague will need, it’s all too easy to overlook the needs of patients themselves.

How Augnito empowers mental health trusts

Developed in close partnership with medical professionals, Augnito delivers integrated, flexible speech recognition—and a more efficient, agile way of working. Mental health teams can switch to using Augnito’s designated mental health vocabulary, capturing all the vital clinical data naturally, descriptively, quickly, and accurately. This frees up time to focus on patients, not admin. More importantly, it reduces reporting that encroaches on home life—often the case at the end of the day when the MHP is finished.

Crucially, Augnito was built for the fast-moving, collaborative nature of healthcare. Patient notes can be captured on any device—Windows, MacOS, smartphone, or tablet—or directly in an existing clinical system. And a focus on security means information can be safely stored, fed into other systems, or securely shared with other teams across healthcare and social care as necessary.

Available in the cloud on a simple subscription basis, Augnito offers:

• Beyond 99% accuracy
• Support for any accent out-of-the-box
• No need for time-consuming voice training
• Faster reporting with average 5% efficiency gains

AI-powered speech recognition like Augnito won’t transform mental health provision itself. But it can transform how MHP’s work every day, enabling them to care for patients with more eye contact, more time to talk and listen, applying more attention to every step along the care journey to improved mental health.

Learn more about Augnito

Augnito is already impacting the patient journey through a growing list of UK reseller and integration partners. Request a demo to try Augnito Spectra for 7 days to see how it can help you.

With the NHS under immense pressure, bed stocks are infamously limited. However, this pressure shows no signs of slowing – and the number of beds across the NHS shows no sign of growing in a way that’s substantially impactful. What other approaches can we take to address this major challenge and, crucially, how can technology help?

From healthcare professionals to the general public, most of us are intimately familiar with the continued lack of beds in our healthcare system. Even pre-pandemic, few health experts felt we were well equipped with beds and ample resources. Now, the BMA continue to stress the severity of this problem: data from December 2022 reports occupancy rates consistently exceeding safe levels and call capacity a ‘critical limiting factor’ for the NHS.

Beyond those early adopter areas like radiology and pathology, speech recognition technology has the potential to reduce costs across entire Trusts – potentially freeing up resources to invest in new ways to grow capacity and bring occupancy down to reasonable levels.

The impact of DTOC on bed capacity

Recently, in our previous blog post, we wrote about the significant challenge of Delayed Transfers of Care (DTOCs) – those periods when a patient is ready to be discharged from an acute care bed but remains in the bed regardless. Typical bottlenecks and obstacles to discharge/transfer include:

• Awaiting completion of assessment, including incomplete documentation
• Awaiting care packages
• Awaiting nursing home placement
• Awaiting community equipment and adaptations
• Awaiting further non-acute NHS care
• Awaiting care packages in own home
• Disputes and legal challenges

Across all these areas, faster documentation and reporting time can help keep people moving along the patient journey. If not, DTOC dramatically worsens the problem of poor bed stocks and low capacity.

Every day a patient stays in an acute care bed unnecessarily, beds remain unavailable to those who need them. While this is obviously a barrier to delivering timely, effective treatment and care, it also creates unnecessary cost.

The costs of a widespread bed shortage

Bed shortages, driven by needlessly extended hospital stays and DTOCs, lead to significant costs to the NHS. This is a wasted expense that does nothing to improve patient journeys, experiences, and outcomes.

In February 2020, DTOC metrics reported by the GSS show on average 5370 people were delayed per day. The actual cost of these delays is significant by any measure. According to Age UK, in 2019, the cost of a DTOC bed per day was £346. whereas Department of Health figures from 2017 put the cost at £400 per day. Even if we assume the NHS’ own £350/day cost was accurate in February 2020, this means that month’s cost for 155,700 days was over a staggering £54 million.

An effective, accurate speech recognition technology like Augnito can reduce this cost and deliver a considerable saving by enabling clinicians and healthcare professionals to work and report more efficiently, removing some of the above mentioned common obstacles to prompt discharge or transfer. And the cost of adopting Augnito is significantly less than the cost of adding and maintaining more beds.

Repurposing even just 5% of February 2020’s estimated DTOC cost into Augnito licences could empower tens of thousands of clinicians to work more efficiently, reduce reporting time, and focus their energy on patients. Even a seemingly small 1% efficiency gain could dramatically improve both staff workloads and, more importantly, patient journeys overall.

Addressing the consistent fall in NHS beds

Over the past three decades, the total number of NHS hospital beds in England has more than halved. In part, this reflects changes to the ways patients are treated and is a trend we can see reflected in other advanced healthcare systems. For example, an increase in day surgery and long-term policies to move patients into care in the community have partly driven this ongoing reduction in capacity.

Of course, we all know that demand hasn’t followed this proposed downward trajectory. While the number of beds may have decreased, the number of patients treated has continued to rise sharply. Today, the UK has fewer acute beds relative to its population than most other European countries.

Worse, the longer-term outlook is bleak. The Health Foundation’s REAL Centre analysed bed stocks against best-case demand and found a significant gap. According to the report, 35% more beds will be required by 2030 – even if NHS initiatives to reduce hospital stay durations succeed. Apply the estimated DTOC rates we’ve shown above and the cost skyrockets.

The impact of speech recognition on efficiency and cost

As the NHS has consistently found for more than three decades, expanding bed stocks isn’t a simple task. Capacity is a complex issue and, as demand continues to surge, occupancy rates of 99% and above aren’t likely to improve without significant change.

It’s not that technology like Augnito AI powered speech recognition can solve the DTOC challenge overnight. It’s that incremental improvements to the way healthcare professionals work, collaborate, and share information creates consistent improvements over time. Eliminating the slow reporting and typing into cumbersome, often outdated systems saves time, reduces costs, and enables budgets to be repurposed into wider, systemic changes.

Augnito is already used widely across healthcare, helping those in diagnostic and reporting roles capture clinical data quickly, securely, accurately, and more cost-effectively. Crucially, Augnito’s flexible licensing means it’s available to Trusts for a fraction of the cost of adding capacity or keeping patients in beds for longer than they need them.

For Trusts, this creates time and money savings with a compound effect. The ease of implementing Augnito across multiple individuals, departments and parts of the patient journey means even small efficiency gains for healthcare professionals create a significant, meaningful saving overall. The facts speak for themselves: the cost of a single extra bed per day is close to if not 10 times more than the cost of a single Augnito licence for a month.

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Augnito is already quietly and positively impacting the patient journey and the continuum of care in primary and secondary care.  Talk to us to find out more or request an evaluation version / Augnito app to see how it could help you.

In a climate of continued and yet unprecedented pressure on the NHS, Delayed Transfer of Care (DTOC) is not just another step in the patient journey. It’s a crucial step on the path to positive care outcomes. Since 2014/15 the number and rate of delayed transfers has been consistently rising. 

Today, nine years on, delayed transfers of care (DTOCs) contribute to intensifying backlogs, rising costs, and more distress for patients. Can technology built to make healthcare more efficient influence both the extent of DTOC incidents and Trusts’ ability to deal with them?

Shiraz Austin, Managing Director at Scribetech (UK) Ltd – UK distributor for Augnito solutions – takes a deep dive into this topic.

Over the past few years, the number of available beds within the NHS has continued to decline.
In December 2022, the average daily number of beds was just 136,508. This reflects a ratio of 2.4 beds per 1000 people in the UK population – significantly lower than countries like Austria (7.1 beds/1000 people) and Germany (7.8 beds/1000 people).

There are a range of systemic, complex issues that contribute to the UK’s lack of NHS beds. Initiatives like the Urgent and Emergency Care Plan promise to improve this situation, but this is a slow, ongoing process. The results may only be seen years into the future, leaving Trusts, CCGs and healthcare providers to instead pay attention to a metric that’s more meaningful in the short-term: Delayed Transfers of Care, or DTOCs.

The scale of the DTOC problem

DTOC describes patients who are clinically ready to be transferred or discharged from acute or non-acute care, but continue to occupy a bed. This can result in needlessly long hospital stays for individual patients, as well as delays for other patients who are waiting for a bed.

While Delayed Transfers of Care should be minimised through effective discharge planning and joint working between NHS and social services to ensure safe, person-centred transfers, unfortunately, for the past two decades, this planning process hasn’t been as effective as it could be.

We might assume that the NHS carries the majority share of responsibility for delays, however, social care carries its fair share too. The overall pattern of DTOCs is not uniform between the two organisations responsible for the delay. Percentage increases for patients delayed, per day over a 10-year period, have fluctuated between these organisations’ systems, showing patients either awaiting a social care package in their own home, or awaiting further non-acute NHS care as being the main reasons for the DTOC.

In 2017 the NHS DTOC goal was just 3.5%. The gap between this goal and reality is significant.

If we look at data between August 2010 and 2017, NHS delays increased 25%, while social care delays were up 130%. By December 2018, the number had decreased by over one third to 4,155 patients delayed on average per day. Since then, data for February 2020 shows that the number increased again by 29%, to an average of 5,370 patients delayed per day.

What does this mean in terms of days and cost? In February 2020, there were 155,700 delayed days across the NHS. While NHS England paused reporting DTOC data as the COVID-19 pandemic intensified, a common-sense approach tells us the number of delayed days is likely to have worsened over the past three years.

For patients, DTOC severely impacts the quality of care being delivered and creates difficult, often distressing patient journeys. For the NHS, DTOC creates added staff pressures, workload burdens and a significant, unnecessary cost.

The financial impact of DTOCs

Findings published by the Government Statistics Service (GSS) for February 2020 show the average number of people delayed per day that month in England was 5370. While some sources like Age UK estimated the NHS excess bed day rate at £346 in 2019, the Department of Health report average costs in 2017 of around £400 depending on treatment. Multiply the delays per day by the day rate and we have an estimated cost of DTOC of £2,148,000 per day for February 2020 alone.

Yearly figures seem to have stopped being used past 2016, when a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) showed delays in discharging older patients from hospital when they no longer need care was costing the NHS £820 million per year.

The complexities of calculating excess bed day rates and recorded bed stays have been compounded by treatment tariffs and care cost models that do nothing to reduce the financial burden that DTOCs clearly carry. They reflect a direct cost in the £millions to the NHS – for maintaining patients in beds when they are ready to be discharged, or transferred, to home care or social care. And let’s not discount the financial ripple effect that DTOC has throughout the whole healthcare process that is even more difficult to track: poor bed availability, high occupancy and growing waiting lists. All resulting in patients entering the NHS system later, when their conditions may be more acute and, ultimately, more costly to treat.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK Government looked to help tackle this issue through funding designed to financially assist discharges to social care. However, with this funding planned to end after March 2023, the NHS will need to look at new ways to maximise limited budgets.

How speech recognition can support DTOC improvement

Technology like clinical speech recognition (SR) has the capacity to increase productivity and streamline the creation of medical documentation for healthcare professionals, easing the burden of growing admin workloads with faster, more flexible and mobile ways of working. We believe it can also influence key metrics such as DTOCs – as well as create savings for NHS budgets.

Reducing internal delays to discharge or transfer

In part, DTOC is affected by internal delays – the technical and logistical barriers to getting patients discharged swiftly and effectively. The administration involved in discharging or transferring patients must be efficient and accurate if they are to be discharged on time.

Developed in partnership with medical professionals, Augnito delivers cloud-based, AI-powered speech recognition on any device or operating system. Augnito empowers clinicians to capture live clinical patient data easily and wherever they need to, with extreme accuracy and none of the delays of manual transcription or digital dictation.

Patient notes, referrals, follow-up letters and care package instructions can be ‘spoken’ directly into an electronic patient record (EPR), simplifying the patient discharge or transfer process. This not only saves valuable time and money for the NHS and social care system, but also helps reduce the patient journey and, ultimately, improve care outcomes.

Reducing external factors on DTOCs

Efforts to tackle the DTOC problem will need a whole system-wide approach addressing the consistent lack of capacity across all parts of the system.

As outlined earlier in this document, DTOCs are not exclusively an NHS problem. The data referenced in ‘The scale of the DTOC problem’ highlights that in many cases, patients are unable to be discharged due to a lack of onward care, including from space in care homes to funding for home care services. Many of these challenges are the result of a health and social care system that continues to be under significant pressure, as well as a longstanding lack of investment in important provisions like community nursing.

It’s in the DTOC that the impact of clinical SR technology, like Augnito, has the potential to be most transformative. Switching to Augnito and using streamlined, automated clinical workflows can create an efficiency gain of around 5% per day. This time saving has a very real financial impact. It can provide a reduction in document turnaround time, patient referral record keeping, and clinical documentation inaccuracies/errors – as part of the discharge process and the patient onward care journey. This could save the NHS hundreds of thousands of pounds per month.

Currently, these productivity bottlenecks are a wasted administrative cost, not influencing or improving the patient experience. Transforming efficiency is significantly more cost-effective than trying to grow bed stocks. With a new, more seamless way of working, savings can be focused on what matters most: replacing the soon to cease March 2023 Government funding, and reinvesting in patient care by improving healthcare provisions outside the hospital environment, raising the standards of community care, and ensuring every patient can be discharged effectively and at the right time for a better outcome.

In our next blog, we’ll discuss in more depth how the financial implications of DTOC extend across the whole of the health and social care system and how savings could be repurposed for medical efficiency gains and an improved continuum of care.

Try a faster way of working – today

Augnito is already impacting the patient journey through our growing list of UK partners. Request an evaluation version or try the Augnito app to see how your system can benefit.