[London, 29 March 2023] – With the NHS struggling to meet the demands of an ageing population, complex discharge processes, and widespread bed shortages, new technology has an important role to play in safeguarding patient outcomes.
The past few years have been incredibly challenging for the NHS, with the pandemic and heightened demand bringing longstanding problems into sharp, urgent focus. Bed shortages continue to be a major issue, with British Medical Association data from December 2022 reporting that occupancy rates consistently exceed safe levels. Meanwhile, Delayed Transfers of Care (DTOCs) create unnecessary bottlenecks, with patients occupying beds when they are clinically ready to be discharged or transferred.
For NHS Trusts, this creates a significant, largely unnecessary cost – one that’s hard to immediately address by adding new bed stocks. That’s why Scribetech, the co-creators of AI speech recognition solution Augnito, are working to help Trusts understand the potential of innovative new technology.
“For decades, the NHS has tried to address bed stock and occupancy issues by adding more beds, but we have consistently seen that it’s almost impossible to keep up with demand” stated Shiraz Austin, Managing Director at Scribetech and Co-Founder of Augnito. “Technology and changes in ways of working have the potential to reduce occupancy rates and improve care in a way that’s more sustainable. But this transformation is only possible if it makes financial sense.”
Estimating the financial cost of DTOCs and the bed shortage is difficult. Department of Health figures put the cost of a DTOC bed at £400/day, while Age UK report 2019 costs of £346/day. Using a forgiving cost of £350/day, this implies a bill in excess of £54 million just for the delayed days in February 2020, when DTOC metrics were last reported.
Speech recognition technology like Augnito can’t immediately eliminate all DTOCs, but it can deliver consistent, incremental improvements to the workflows of multidisciplinary teams (MDTs). With real time dictation and transcription in any platform or dedicated desktop and smartphone applications, healthcare professionals can reduce the risk of delays arising from inaccurate records, lost records, and breakdowns in communication.
Austin continued: “The financial outlook is clear: the cost of new technology is significantly less than the cost of delays and low bed stocks. The cost of a single extra bed per day is 10 times the cost of an Augnito licence for a month. But that commercial reality is just one part of the picture. There’s a human cost that must also be considered.”
While delays and occupied beds affect every patient – and, indeed, the entire healthcare system including social care – some particularly vulnerable groups are disproportionately affected. December 2021 saw intensive care beds for children reach record occupancy of 89% across the country. Meanwhile, older patients are particularly at risk given the typical complexity of their discharge or transfer to other providers.
When paediatric beds simply aren’t available or elderly patients are kept on wards for weeks, even months after they’re ready to be transferred, their experience is resoundingly negative. They’re unable to receive the care that is appropriate, when it is required, in the right setting. In some cases, this comes with a very real and measurable impact on outcomes.
Austin concluded: “Augnito is designed to work for NHS Trusts – a cloud-hosted technology that’s significantly lower in cost than unnecessary delays and can be implemented quickly and easily. But it’s also designed to empower healthcare professionals and multidisciplinary teams to work efficiently, so they can act based on what patients need, without being limited by processes and old, outdated workflows.”
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Notes to editors
Full blog posts referenced in this media alert:
https://www.scribetech.co.uk/2023/02/28/how-speech-recognition-technology-can-support-a-national-bed-shortage/
https://www.scribetech.co.uk/2023/03/15/reducing-dtoc-on-vulnerable-patients/
For further information, interview opportunities or accompanying graphics please contact: [email protected]
About Scribetech and the Augnito solution – visit https://www.scribetech.co.uk/ for details and follow us on Linked-In.
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 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 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.
[London, 10 February 2023] – As the NHS continues to address and reduce Delayed Transfer of Care (DTOC) incidents – and their associated costs – speech recognition has the potential to deliver transformative efficiency gains.
With the healthcare system under unprecedented pressure, NHS Trusts are reflecting on key metrics associated with performance, cost, and quality of patient care. Delayed Transfers of Care (DTOCs) see patients continue to occupy beds when they are clinically ready to be transferred or discharged. This results in significant expense to the NHS, a lack of available bed stocks, and disrupted journeys for both the patients waiting for transfer and those waiting for beds.
According to Scribetech, UK distributors of Augnito, a cloud-based, AI-powered speech recognition solution, new technology and workflow transformation have the potential to significantly improve how DTOC is managed.
“DTOCs are an indicator of how healthy the health and social care systems are,” stated Shiraz Austin, Managing Director at Scribetech (UK) Ltd and Co-Founder of Augnito.ai. “When patients continue to occupy beds they don’t clinically need, there’s a ripple effect that stretches across the patient journey. This includes delays to treatment for new patients, as well as a considerable amount of distress for those needlessly held in hospital.”
The scale of the DTOC problem is significant. In February 2020, reports show, there were an average of 5370 people delayed per day across the NHS in England – some attributable to the NHS, some attributable to social care, and some with joint responsibility. Based on the Department of Health’s reported costs of an excess bed per day (£350 – £400), the estimated cost of DTOC was as high as £2,148,000 per day for that month alone.
However, this immediate financial impact is just one consequence of DTOCs. With bed stocks at an all-time low and occupancy at an all-time high, DTOCs directly affect the availability of treatment, making acute care when a bed is finally available even more costly and negatively affecting patient outcomes.
Innovative new technology has the potential to positively influence these outcomes – but Austin remains realistic about the results.
Austin continued: “It’s not that technology like Augnito can solve the DTOC challenge overnight. It’s that incremental improvements to the way healthcare professionals work, collaborate, and share information eliminate the low-hanging fruit of slow reporting and typing into cumbersome, often outdated, systems. And time saved leads to reduced cost, where budgets can be repurposed into wider, systemic changes.”
Augnito was designed in partnership with healthcare professionals to address their biggest challenges. This includes bringing real-time SR to the clinical systems used as part of the discharge and transfer process, allowing people to work faster and more flexibly.
Adopted widely, Augnito can deliver:
– Faster reporting time and fewer internal delays to patient discharge or transfer
– Reduced costs, which can be repurposed into growing bed stocks and community nursing
– Increased bed availability with less waste and lower occupancy
– A way to offset the removal of the Government’s Covid-19 DTOC funding
As standard, Augnito empowers healthcare professionals with advanced SR on any device – desktops, web browsers, and mobiles. With a flexible SDK and API, Augnito can also be integrated into existing systems for accurate, immediate capture into an Electronic Patient Record.
Based on February 2020 DTOC data, just a small reduction in turnaround time, inaccuracies and errors could save the NHS hundreds of thousands per month. Austin concluded: “Augnito creates a more seamless way of working for healthcare professionals, helping with considerable workloads and backlogs. But its real impact is on the NHS as a whole, improving financial drainage and removing the bottlenecks that become obstacles to outstanding patient care and the best possible outcomes.”
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Notes to editors
Read the full blog post here www.scribetech.co.uk/2023/01/31/can-the-advantages-of-clinical-voice-ai-sr-technology-help-reduce-dtoc
For further information, interview opportunities or accompanying graphics please contact: [email protected]
About Scribetech and the Augnito solution – visit https://www.scribetech.co.uk/ for details and follow us on Linked-In.
About Augnito India Private Limited – visit Augnito.ai.
[Lo
ndon, 26 October 2022] – Augnito cloud-based voice-AI driven speech recognition technology helps accelerate healthcare digital transformation with new levels of accuracy, productivity and efficiency.
In the context of Government targets and plans for Digital Health and Social Care across the 2021 WGLL framework and 2022 Spending Review, Trusts are under increasing pressure to modernise the way they work. Augnito’s co-founder highlights the importance of cloud hosted, flexible and future-proofed solutions to make this transformation a reality.
”When modernisation is the focal point, Trusts replace one legacy platform with another, without necessarily addressing the real needs of users. As a result, they can’t unlock the true potential of a properly integrated system,” stated Shiraz Austin, Co-Founder of Augnito. He continued: “For example in radiology, the reason modernisation is taking place now is because the way radiologists and other medical departments work, have fundamentally changed. Existing backlogs prior to 2020, radiologist shortages, and clumsy technology made change inevitable. The pandemic and the surge in remote working have accelerated this change.”
For the promised NHS funding to achieve its digital transformation objectives and, specifically in diagnostics, the stated aims of increasing efficiency, making data sharing easier, and speeding up patient treatment, Augnito developers have identified 5 fundamental requirements for radiologists:
1. Faster transcription including extremely accurate dictation directly into clinical systems
2. Time-saving automation including ways to enter repeating report text without re-typing every time or cutting and
pasting from previously filed templates
3. Solutions that are available everywhere, not just inside healthcare settings but remotely and even on the move
4. Deep integration across all clinical systems for a seamless, holistic diagnostic and patient data workflow
5. Secure report sharing to deliver improvements across the clinical reporting path
Austin added: “Speech recognition is an effective way for radiologists to work faster and smarter – without compromising accuracy. Augnito delivers significant benefits out-of-the-box, and those benefits go beyond the radiology department.”
Augnito is a next-generation cloud-hosted voice-AI driven solution that can be securely accessed from any device including desktops, tablets, smartphones and browser-based applications. Augnito can also be integrated with a wide range of clinical systems and reporting technologies using its flexible API and SDK; delivering highly accurate transcription straight into the radiologists’ reporting platform, helping them save time and easily manage backlogs and workloads.
Radiologists, can also seamlessly and quickly share reports with other medical professionals and doctors involved in the patient’s care journey. For Trusts and healthcare providers, Augnito’s cloud-hosted approach makes implementing, provisioning, and managing this new technology simple and cost-effective.
Austin concludes that this ‘cloud availability’ is key to how Augnito will help transform radiology:
“More funding is great for radiology, but it does create pressure for Trusts to rethink how they work and embed new technology. Augnito gives them the best of both worlds – not just industry leading speech recognition with unparalleled accuracy, but a holistic solution that’s deployed with no costly changes to infrastructure or ongoing maintenance and updates.”
ENDS
Read the full blog post here www.scribetech.co.uk/2022/09/26/how-integrated-speech-drives-radiologists-performance/
For further information, interview opportunities or accompanying graphics please contact: [email protected]
Notes to editors – About Augnito
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 developed by its parent company, 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.
www.scribetech.co.uk/augnito-speechrecognition
[London, 29 September 2022] Speech recognition has provided efficiency benefits to the health profession for decades, but can the integration of this vital tool into clinical systems and into radiology work processes further boost performance? Shiraz Austin, co-founder of Augnito, a voice-AI technology company, takes a deep dive into the integration benefits of clinical speech-enabled solutions.
Speech recognition as a mature technology has evolved over the years. Today it has the potential to redefine radiology, bringing new levels of accuracy, quality, speed and security. However, maximising these performance gains requires a measured approach to integrating voice-AI driven solutions and radiologists’ working processes.
Shiraz Austin, Co-Founder of Augnito notes, “The most impactful solution is one that’s deeply integrated, bringing the best possible speech recognition (SR) engine to existing PACS/RIS workflows. In the last two years, work processes have been required to be more flexible than ever, and to be delivered remotely, or, from wherever consultants find themselves. Add to this the unprecedented pressure that the pandemic created across the NHS – with resources strained beyond their limit – and it’s no surprise that health-tech solutions, including SR are needed, and they need to deliver more than user-efficiency gains. To have the greatest impact, they need to perform seamlessly, securely and accurately at a range of different locations.”
Selecting the right speech recognition solution to deliver a seamless experience on any device to allow radiologists to work without limitations, comes down to integration, which will also need to be efficient in itself.
Shiraz continues, “Considerations into hardware, connectivity, data security, user requirements system operating platforms, IT resource availability, costs and ultimately ROI across a site, help to draw up a solution needs check-list. In many cases a legacy product will be in place which no longer supports the growing needs of a Trust, thus a ‘usability vs. new deployment’ review is essential to analyse performance and savings that could be gained with switching solutions. With a clear improvements scope, integration of the right solution into an existing clinical system with minimum or no disruption and flexible reporting processes can boost the desired user benefits, reduce backlogs, support better workflows and save money.”
The latest in voice-AI driven speech recognition, Augnito, offers a cloud-hosted product that’s already supported on multiple devices, and integration to clinical systems via its API and SDK. As a result, radiologists can benefit from integrated speech recognition and clinical word processing within their reporting tools, securely and accurately, wherever they need to without disruption.
Augnito is transforming speech recognition to meet the evolving needs of clinicians, by understanding the challenges of today, and offering a flexible solution and ROI to support the future of healthcare.
ENDS
Read the full blog here https://www.scribetech.co.uk/2022/09/26/how-integrated-speech-drives-radiologists-performance/
For further information, interview opportunities or accompanying graphics please contact: [email protected]
About Augnito
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 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 everywhere.
Augnito was developed by its parent company 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.
www.scribetech.co.uk/augnito-speechrecognition
[London, 26 September 2022] – The developers of Augnito, a secure, cloud-based and AI-driven clinical speech recognition product suite, have recorded rapid growth in their flagship solution’s first year sales results in the UK.
Augnito has recorded first year rapid sales growth in the UK for its secure and portable AI-driven clinical speech recognition (SR) technology, which offers fast, effortless ways to capture live clinical data, on any device, with 99.3% accuracy.
Augnito was launched in the UK in September 2021 with active sales taking off in the first calendar quarter of 2022, securing in excess of 150 implementations in healthcare environments across England and a number of live pilots with NHS Trusts. The uplift was driven by demand for its solution in the radiology sector, which soared as the health service deals with the backlogs in imaging and reporting created by the pandemic. Now, 12 months since launching, those Augnito pilots have turned into deployments across additional NHS Trusts and over 1000 licence sales across the country being taken up by radiologists and private hospitals through valued strategic technology partners, where Augnito API and SDK is speech-enabling clinical reporting systems and augmenting workflows to assist healthcare institutions to improve patient care across all departments.
Partnerships established this past year include Wellbeing Software, a leading supplier of specialist clinical information solutions, Cimar, a cloud-native health information medical imaging platform, and Hexarad, a UK leading teleradiology service provider.
The developers of Augnito continue to set their sights higher, aiming for sustained sales growth within the next fiscal year, determined to continue to disrupt the clinical SR healthcare market. To help drive that, the business has launched a dedicated UK channel programme looking to sign up value-added resellers and managed service providers that have a healthcare focus and the technical skills necessary to deliver IT solutions for the market.
Shiraz Austin, Co-Founder for Augnito, said: “From the outset, Augnito was built in close partnership with clinicians, using human-centred design, to create a Natural Language Processing engine to fit their needs – not the other way round. As a result, Augnito offers excellent support for a wide variety of clinical vocabulary, covering more than 30 medical specialities, and workflows and this is what has driven market interest in, and sales of, our voice-AI solution.”
“We are extremely pleased with our performance. It’s really a strong validation of our vision and product capabilities; customers are increasingly looking to alternative voice-AI driven solutions such as ours which address a number of core issues that confront those on the healthcare frontline, such as improving efficiency and accuracy, as well as optimising clinical workflows,” added Austin.
Augnito is a secure and portable AI-driven clinical SR product suite that offers fast, effortless ways to capture live clinical data, on any device. The SaaS cloud-based solution is proven to create highly accurate clinical records, improving the timing on everything from patient diagnosis to patient hospital stays in delayed transfers of care. Radiology departments have been the early adopters and pioneers of speech recognition technology to accommodate the ever-increasing levels of a wide variety of diagnostic reporting and the ever-expanding modality spectrum. Augnito now offers radiologists an improved, more efficient way to deliver their service using the benefits that voice-driven AI technology provides. In addition, and following the success of it’s first year of business in the UK, Augnito is extending its solutions offering to other medical and surgical departments across the national healthcare sector.
All Augnito products remove the need for healthcare IT teams to support the solution with additional hardware and/or software. Product application enhancements are delivered in the cloud as soon as they are ready for release, without the need to upgrade locally installed versions. This reduces dependency on IT resource teams, potential associated product downtime, delays, and costs.
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NOTES TO EDITORS
About Augnito
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 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 everywhere. Augnito was developed by its parent company 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.