Leeds NHS Trust renews and extends partnership with Epro

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has renewed and extended its contract with specialist UK healthcare informatics provider, Epro.

Epro has been a supplier to Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust (LTHT) since 2011. The five-year contract renewal for Epro’s clinical workflow solutions was agreed in winter 2022, and now includes Epro’s latest Speech Recognition solution.

Today, LTHT has over 4,000 users of Epro’s Clinical Platform delivering solutions including digital dictation, business resilience, Speech Recognition clinical correspondence, workflow management and endpoint digital correspondence delivery.

LTHT is one of the largest and busiest acute hospital trusts in the UK, and one of the largest teaching hospitals in Europe, providing healthcare and specialist services for the communities of Leeds, Yorkshire and the Humber and beyond.

Its seven hospitals and medical facilities provide healthcare and specialist services to over 1.5 million patients each year, including more than 200,000 emergency patients.

Andy Webster, CCIO at LTHT, said: “Technological pace, business change management and a trust-led digital transformation agenda means it was vital to have a collaborative approach between clinicians, the project team and Epro.

“This meant we could implement new front-end speech recognition functionality, with a cloud-hosted consumption-based speech engine, integrated seamlessly within an enhanced Epro correspondence workflow.

“I would have no hesitation in recommending Epro as an innovative, trusted partner.”

There were two key considerations in LTHT’s decision to extend its Epro implementation to include Speech Recognition.

Its consumption-based, rather than licence-based model, gives the trust the facility to onboard the technology in a phased approach, without incurring large upfront fixed costs.

In addition, the solution comes with a trust-specific custom language model, which means the speech recognition machine is pre-designed to recognise key terminology by department or speciality, which reduces the time clinical staff need to spend training the speech engine.

“We are incredibly excited to be a part of Leeds Teaching Hospitals’ digital transformation journey and to see the trust’s use of Epro extend to Speech Recognition,” said Jonathan Elliott, managing director of Epro.

“Today, arguably more so than ever previously, NHS’ priorities are clearly focused on unlocking as much clinical efficiency and capacity as possible within existing systems and workflows.

“This is exactly the premise upon which Epro was founded, along with our flexible and customisable approach, which means our clients get the exact solution they need to fit their own unique technological requirements.”