As new innovations continue to change the ways we work, radiology has a lot to gain from adopting new technology with confidence. But the biggest potential impact comes from deeply integrated solutions—not discrete, siloed tools that only make workflows more complex.
Previously, we’ve shared our insights on the challenges facing radiology, from workloads and backlogs to the perpetual pressure to reduce costs and find efficiencies. Today, those priorities remain critically important and the challenges faced in diagnostics only seem to intensify. Workflow gains are offset by the rise in chronic diseases and continued staff shortages – and the only way to meaningfully transform radiology is by extending the benefits of new workflows as widely as possible.
With Augnito, we’ve seen the most significant impact from AI-powered speech recognition that’s integrated with the systems radiologists and teleradiology providers already use every day.
The benefits of AI speech recognition in radiology
In the past few years, AI has been widely adopted across multiple industries and for a variety of tasks. These include data handling, generating content, and automating the routine tasks that take time away from more skilled work where the human touch is essential.
Healthcare is no different. Adopting a technology like speech recognition using AI has the potential to deliver considerable benefits, not just to individual users but entire Trusts and, ultimately, patients. These include:
- More accurate reporting
- Increased efficiency and faster workflows
- Managed security and compliance with cloud hosted solutions
- A reduced risk of errors
- More agility and the ability to report from anywhere.
However, while healthcare can unlock the same benefits as enterprises, the barriers to adoption are substantially different.
Making AI more accessible for radiology
In May 2024, The Royal College of Radiologists highlighted several major barriers to the adoption of AI. These included workforce shortfalls, outdated IT infrastructure, and educating radiologists to use new AI tools effectively. The report also emphasised the need for robust governance frameworks to bring control to the way new technologies are implemented, adopted and maintained.
Unlike other sectors, radiology’s adoption of AI is potentially hamstrung by the financial realities and organisational efficiencies of how healthcare works today.
In part, this can be addressed by making AI-powered solutions more accessible and adaptable. Augnito, for example, integrates sophisticated AI into a refreshingly straightforward and easy to use frontend. Radiologists can start with Augnito on any device with little or no training and, since Augnito is hosted in the cloud, there’s no need to be limited by an existing IT infrastructure.
Simultaneously, the time-savings achieved by Augnito lead to direct cost savings – on average, switching to speech recognition for reports (as opposed to slow manual transcription) creates an efficiency gain of around 5%. This could save £100,000s across an entire Trust, resources that can be repurposed into addressing the more fundamental barriers to transformation like legacy IT.
Integrating AI speech recognition with RIS/PACS
Another way we’re making AI more accessible in radiology is through our longstanding partnerships with leading Picture Archiving & Communication System (PACS) and Radiology Information System (RIS) providers.
Augnito has been integrated by Hexarad into its radiology reporting platform, empowering radiologists with a faster, more flexible way of reporting, reflecting Hexarad’s forward-thinking approach and position as Radiology Technology Innovator of the Year. In practice, Hexarad’s improvements to radiology workflows are positively impacting patients. An implementation in North West Anglia created time savings of up to 80 minutes per patient and Hexarad enables 30% more MSK scans per hour with its streamlined workflow including Augnito.
Similarly, Augnito is integrated with Intelerad’s PACS reporting, bringing voice recognition options into the reporting process. Intelerad’s InSight PACS is an established leader in the space, recognised Best in KLAS for the UK and Ireland PACS category in 2024.
At this year’s UK Imaging and Oncology (UKIO) congress 2024 in Liverpool, representatives from Intelerad and Hexarad presented discussions on trends, best practice, and the future of radiology. They were joined by other high-profile Scribetech partners with Augnito embedded into their solutions, including:
- Aptvision Ltd, with their e-referral portal, delivering better patient outcomes, reducing workloads for medical staff
- CIMAR UK Ltd, who recently joined forces with NHS England to deliver the AI Development Platform Pilot at Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust that will enable the deployment of AI in medical imaging across the NHS
- Fujifilm Healthcare UK, who have integrated Augnito into their Universal Reporting module and presented this at UKIO along with 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
- OpenRad Services UK Ltd – Biotronics 3D, 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.
The integration of Augnito Voice Services into these partners’ platforms reflects the continued growth of Augnito AI powered speech recognition across radiology. While Scribetech has been an approved NHS solutions provider for over two decades, it brought Augnito to the UK market as a disruptive technology with a view to democratise the use of speech recognition across the continuum of care through Augnito’s 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, Scribetech supports more than 2,000 UK radiologists who have switched to Augnito – through the company’s partnerships and direct channels. This year’s UKIO theme and message ‘Vision and Values: Putting People First’ resonates with the positive effect and impact that Augnito has had and is having on radiologists, and on patient imaging and diagnostics.
Learn more about Augnito
Interested in becoming an Augnito Spectra reseller, or an Augnito Voice Services integration partner? Contact us. See how Augnito makes cloud-based AI benefits more accessible to radiologists. Request a demo.
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.
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.