[London, 31 August 2023] – With Augnito voice-driven AI transcription capabilities now integrated into the OpenRad Cloud (by Biotronics3D), its English speaking users will benefit from the increased efficiency and functionality that Augnito’s native speech reporting offers.

Scribetech today announced the successful integration of Augnito Voice Services™, an AI-powered voice-driven speech recognition API/SDK, into OpenRad Cloud (by Biotronics3D) – a remote radiology reporting platform.

OpenRad is a supplier of innovative radiology solutions for static and mobile diagnostic imaging centres worldwide, empowering healthcare professionals and the wider clinical research community with fully digitalised workflow processes that connect people, technology, and data.

Augnito is a secure and portable clinical speech recognition suite that offers medical professionals highly accurate, fast, effortless ways to dictate and transcribe live clinical data, on any mobile or desktop device – without the need for typing or outsourced services. For integrators and systems developers, Augnito delivers effective speech-enablement and voice-driven capability to many applications and clinical systems.

With the Augnito Voice Services API/SDK integrated into the cloud-based reporting platform, OpenRad can assist a severely understaffed and overworked profession with time-saving, highly accurate speech recognition technology. The combined solution means radiologists can accommodate increasing workloads and ever-expanding levels of diagnostic reporting from wherever they have an internet connection.

By speech-enabling the OpenRad Cloud reporting solution, Augnito delivers enhanced value, increased efficiency, and clinical data accuracy to OpenRad’s thousands of reporters. As well as making workloads more manageable, this also positively impacts the patient journey – from diagnosis to hospital stays – with an improved more seamless continuum of care.

OpenRad has also selected to add Augnito Spectra as a standalone “off the shelf” speech recognition product to its solution offering. The two Augnito products address multiple technology challenges previously experienced by OpenRad reporters. Many of these issues were the result of legacy non-interoperable products that are effective in isolation, but do not work so well together as one cohesive workflow.

Shiraz Austin, Managing Director at Scribetech (UK) Ltd and Co-Founder of Augnito stated: “Augnito is a disruptive innovation technology that carries Scribetech’s commitment to data accuracy along with our strong 20+ year heritage of delivering digital dictation solutions and transcription services to the NHS. It brings speech recognition to the clinical healthcare professionals who need it the most, alleviating clinical risk, cutting costs, and avoiding difficult and time-consuming upgrades on legacy systems.”

“In the UK, we look to provide Augnito speech recognition through a highly selective network of best in breed partners that share our approach to developing solutions that embrace AI innovation to enhance healthcare intelligence. OpenRad solidifies this strategy.”

“Augnito will augment the existing support and reporting benefits that our cloud-based reporting platform offers radiologists in the public and private healthcare system across the UK and English-speaking countries. This integration enables OpenRad to expand on its mission to transform healthcare through an open diagnostic network. At OpenRad we put patient outcomes first by speeding up clinical decision-making through the seamless connection and collaboration of healthcare experts, imaging providers, referrers, and their patients.” stated Brian Plackis Cheng, CEO of OpenRad.

ENDS

For media enquiries, please contact [email protected]

Notes to editors

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. Visit www.scribetech.co.uk for more details.

About OpenRad
Founded in 2021 and based in London and Berlin, OpenRad delivers innovative radiology solutions for static and mobile diagnostic imaging centres worldwide. OpenRad aims to empower healthcare professionals and the wider research community by connecting people, technology, and data.
By combining the intelligent products and services of previously acquired Biotronics3D and Visbion, OpenRad can fully digitalise the workflow processes within the radiological diagnostic sphere. Its zero footprint SaaS based solutions speed up implementation, increase centre utilisation, provide remote access, and reduce cost of ownership. Visit www.openrad.com for further information.

[London, 30 June 2023] – Scribetech has been dramatically expanding its ecosystem of Augnito partnerships and successful integrations in order to empower more healthcare professionals with clinical documentation flexibility and a more efficient way of working.

Efficient clinical speech/voice-to-text digital dictation technology has the potential to improve clinical workflows, reduce delayed patient journeys and enable better informed outcomes. Such technology is only as effective as it is accessible, easy to adopt, easy to integrate, and easy to use.

To this end Scribetech (UK) Ltd, co-creator of Augnito, has invested in a new ecosystem of distributors, value added resellers and integration partners to help bring its AI-powered speech recognition technology to more users across the UK, starting with the new channel’s customers.

In the past three months, companies have been onboarded as distributors for Augnito Spectra – a cloud-based clinical speech recognition solution that supports any English accent, out of the box. This recent UK activity follows successful agreements with resellers in the last quarter. In addition, integration partners including Aptvision, OpenRad and Intelerad have recently integrated Augnito Voice Services into their own radiology reporting platforms, bringing higher levels of accuracy and the time-saving advantage of speech to the systems their respective medical customers already use.

This recent success aligns with Augnito’s sales and development team’s core strategy, reflecting not only a strong 2-year track record in delivering measurable savings and benefits to healthcare, but also reiterating the premier service-oriented heritage it carries from its co-developer’s solution support to the NHS in the last two decades.

More than 12,000 doctors across 355 hospitals and 24 partners in UK, USA, Canada, India, the Middle East and APAC, have signed up to Augnito in just 24 months. They are joined by 1500 radiologists and a growing number of consultants at various NHS Trusts. “Everything comes back to the mission we set out when we launched Augnito in the UK in late 2021,” stated Shiraz Austin, Managing Director at Scribetech (UK) Ltd and Co-Founder of Augnito.

“We know that when access to technology is simplified from the ground up, even small increases in performance turn into huge savings. Those savings can be repurposed into what matters most – making healthcare professionals efficient at delivering exceptional care and improving patient outcomes.”

Interoperability and integration are both key to this important goal. Through Augnito Voice Services and a flexible API/SDK, healthcare technology providers can integrate speech recognition into their own platforms in a matter of weeks. To date, Cimar UK, Hexarad, Fujifilm UK Medical Systems and Magentus have all integrated Augnito technology into their radiology systems, enabling efficient workflows for their customers with more accurate diagnostic reporting.

Augnito Spectra gives users constant access to accurate speech recognition and live data input on any device running either Windows or MAC operating systems. This data is then routed securely to clinical systems including PACS and EPRs. Augnito’s ability to fit into existing clinical workflows makes user adoption easier and effective. It reduces both workload management and costs, as well as changing the way providers deploy new technology – ground up vs. top down.

Austin added: “Through our best-in-breed partnerships, we’re introducing real product flexibility and agility to assist medical health professionals in providing better patient journeys. We’ve been proactive in creating more ways to use Augnito, helping us align to the NHS plan for digital transformation and ensure new technology is integrated in a way that will naturally drive user adoption.”

For IT and technology providers in healthcare, Augnito Spectra carries a compelling (up to) 30% profit margin on every UK licence the partner sells. It is designed to be easy and fast to deploy and looks to complement partners’ existing product portfolios and service offerings. For partners’ users, Augnito Spectra provides simpler and more accurate clinical data input into all major EPR systems.

Austin concluded: “We’ve seen significant demand from resellers because the demand is there across healthcare. Inefficiencies and reporting bottlenecks are costing millions of pounds in Delayed Transfer of Care (DTOC) and bed costs as well as the ever growing patient waiting lists. And with rising demand and intense workloads, everyone inside a Trust knows something needs to change. The healthcare user benefits and the time and financial savings are significant from day one. In fact the cost of Augnito per day is less than a takeaway coffee.”

ENDS

Notes to editors

About Augnito and Scribetech
Augnito is a secure, cloud-based, AI-driven clinical speech recognition product suite. It offers 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 seamless speech recognition to daily workflows and third-party clinical systems, turning medical information into clinical documentation and making healthcare intelligence securely accessible everywhere.

Augnito was co-developed by Scribetech, a clinical voice solutions innovator, fusing 20 years of transcription and digital dictation services to the NHS, speech-to-text, and clinical coding solutions for the healthcare sector, and its own speech recognition engine with advanced voice AI technology.

[London, 18 May 2023] – Augnito Voice Services™ will integrate with Intelerad’s InSight PACS reporting, equipping clients with accessible, advanced speech recognition technology that simplifies patient care.

This new integration partnership will provide Intelerad clients with increased voice recognition options, giving them access to a pioneering, cloud-based product that helps ensure clients are not limited to one voice recognition platform and the risks associated with that dependence.
Intelerad Cloud is a menu of expertly cloud-engineered solutions designed to optimise the benefits of Cloud technology and scalability potential without sacrificing the performance of onsite architecture. Proudly vendor-neutral, Intelerad, is integrating its products with multiple technologies which fit with its cloud-based strategy, Augnito being the most recent. These can assist with the Cloud First strategy by utilising the Cloud for disaster recovery, image exchange and long-term archiving, and this latest addition is another way Intelerad is providing the latest cloud innovations and future resilience required by its clients.

Augnito can be used with a speech microphone or even through an app on a smartphone, making it faster and easier for radiologists and clinicians to diagnose critical conditions where every second counts, leading to better outcomes for patients.

Shiraz Austin, Managing Director at Scribetech (UK) Ltd and Co-Founder of Augnito stated, “Intelerad is a best-in-class provider of medical imaging software with a mission statement that dovetails very well into our own – where technology is developed to impact healthcare in a positive way and where making more time for patient care is paramount. Our partnership agreement solidifies the solution strategies of both organisations, and we’re excited that our secure, cloud-based, voice-powered AI speech recognition technology, Augnito, will play an important role in achieving this. Through the use of Augnito technology, Intelerad can empower radiologists to deliver reporting when and where it’s needed to keep the patient journey and clinical workflows moving.”

Intelerad is exploring integrating Augnito into other products in its portfolio, Arron Edwards, Managing Director of Intelerad, commented, “Intelerad is excited to be able to add the class-leading, cloud-based speech engine from Augnito into our fully featured rich reporting solution, which is built into InSight PACS. Our UK engineering team have worked hand-in-hand with the Augnito engineering team at Scribetech, leading to an incredibly successful integration which will ensure that we can continue to offer a best-in-class solution for our clients.”

ENDS
For further information, please contact:
Clare Dawe, Marketing Manager, Insignia Medical Systems powered by Intelerad
01256 247 010
[email protected]

ABOUT INTELERAD
Intelerad is one of the leading providers of medical imaging software and services for the healthcare industry. Headquartered in Raleigh, NC and Montreal, Quebec, Intelerad has over 900 employees located in offices across six countries. Nearly 2,500 healthcare organizations around the world rely on Intelerad products to manage patient data, helping them reduce time and workload while improving patient outcomes. Intelerad’s award-winning enterprise imaging solutions have been recognized globally by KLAS, with Intelerad’s Ambra Health ranked #1 in Image Exchange for eight consecutive years. To learn more, visit intelerad.com.

Intelerad welcomes contact from PRs and journalists for quotes, expert opinions or bespoke content for particular press articles. Please contact Clare Dawe in the first instance at [email protected]

ABOUT SCRIBETECH AND THE AUGNITO SOLUTION
Augnito is a secure, cloud-based, AI-driven clinical speech recognition product suite. It offers fast, easy ways to capture live clinical data on any device with 99.3% accuracy, support for multiple medical specialties, and no need for voice profile training. Augnito brings seamless speech recognition to daily workflows and third-party clinical systems, turning medical information into clinical documentation and making healthcare intelligence securely accessible wherever it’s needed. Augnito was co-developed by Scribetech, a clinical voice solutions innovator, fusing 20 years of transcription and digital dictation services to the NHS, speech-to-text, and clinical coding solutions for the healthcare sector, and its own speech recognition engine with advanced voice AI technology. Follow us on Linked-In.

 

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.

See how you could save time and money

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.