£150,000 annual savings due to speech recognition tech

Homerton University Hospital NHS Trust is set to save more than £150,000 per year in outsourced transcription costs while improving patient care following deployment of clinical speech recognition.

Having deployed Nuance Communications’ Dragon Medical One cloud-based speech recognition technology, the East London hospital trust has significantly reduced transcription costs, sped up clinical correspondence and freed-up time to care.

Providing a wide range of health services in a hospital and community setting with staff working out of 75 different sites across Hackney, the technology was deployed to tackle the issue of ballooning administrative costs, as well as a slow turnaround time of clinical letters - which took around 17 days to process.

The new medical speech recognition technology enables clinicians to create patient records using just their voice, reducing the turnaround time on clinic letters to just two days, while also saving more than £150,000 per year on transcription expenditure. Clinicians can even enter their notes into the electronic patient record at the point of care during outpatient clinics, creating clinic letters they can give to their patients and send electronically to the GP before the patient leaves the clinic.

Paul Adams, head of Clinical Information System at Homerton University Hospital, said: “The Nuance Dragon Medical One speech recognition engine, utilising artificial intelligence, is incredibly fast and accurate - making life for our clinicians easier. We’ve seen considerable month-on-month cost savings as we replace our transcription services with front-end speech recognition and we’ve also reduced expenditure by not having to invest in additional hardware or recruit scarce and expensive technical resources to run the software day-to-day.”