Worthing and Southlands Hospitals NHS Trust has been able to deliver same day referral letters as a result of implementing a digital dictation workflow system from BigHand.
The technology allows the trust’s 300 users to record and instantly submit dictations to the workflow system, so secretaries can immediately begin to transcribe them.
Secretaries are able to prioritise and expedite urgent patient referral letters, instead of having to find them in hours of taped dictations.
Alison Byatt, project manager at Worthing and Southlands Hospitals NHS Trust said: “Within the diabetes department, a consultant saw a patient who needed to go to another clinic and required a referral letter to take with them.
“The consultant was able to dictate the letter there and then, mark it ‘urgent dictation’ and specify a time within 10 minutes for completion. The message was received by the secretaries instantly and the letter down in the clinic before the patient had left.”
The trust previously used analogue tape dictation equipment. However, broken tapes and poor sound quality led it to review its processes. The review exposed inconsistent document turn-around times that ranged from one day to six weeks.
The contract with BigHand was signed two years ago. The system is being used in all clinical areas, including acute medicine and general surgery, and there are plans to implement it trust-wide.
BigHand is also being used for non-clinical dictation; for example to take down the minutes in departmental meetings.
Earlier this year, Sheffield NHS Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust announced it had implemented BigHand software in one of the biggest roll-outs of digital dictation in the NHS.
The trust claimed it had seen a 10-25% improvement in document turn around times since implementing the software.
Similar: Sheffield’s BigHand for digital dictation
Link: BigHand