AVT will allow us to ‘reimagine healthcare’, says England’s CCIO

Ambient voice technology (AVT) is not “just another digital tool” but “an enabler for us truly to reimagine healthcare”, said England’s national chief clinical information officer.

Alec Price-Forbes told delegates at the HETT Leadership Summit in Leeds that the AI scribing software is key to the ‘digital by default’ model of care outlined in the government’s 10 year health plan.

“It’s an unfortunate truth that the NHS is, in essence, an analogue service built for the 20th century.

“To put it another way, it’s Blockbuster in the age of Netflix and Apple TV. Unless we reform, it’ll go the same way as Blockbuster,” Price-Forbes said. 

He argued that the NHS must move beyond digitising paper processes and “fundamentally reimagine how care is designed, delivered and experienced”.

Price-Forbes described AVT, which uses AI to automatically transcribe patient-clinician conversations into structured medical notes, as “one of the most exciting and transformative capabilities that I’ve seen in a 30 year career” .

He highlighted its ability to “enable the data flow from a patient’s narrative to flow through from the NHS App, single patient record, to be available at the point of care”.

“It’s been proven to work in frontline care settings, consistent reductions in documentation, burden, improved quality, and structural clinical records, reducing clinician, cognitive load, consistent for shift-based services, ambulance, ED, improving productivity, reducing time spent, and in all care settings.

“It’s improving the experience, both for the healthcare professional, and most importantly, the patient,” he said.

However, he stressed that the main barrier is not whether AVT is technically feasible, but how it will be deployed at scale. 

“It’s how we are disciplined in deploying that – working from the centre, working with colleagues, and coordinating with the regions, in systems and providers – to ensure that this happens in a consistent, scalable, and repeatable way,” Price-Forbes said. 

He pointed to the recently published self-certified AVT registry for suppliers as a “tactical step”, adding that there is “so much more to do”.

“That’s outlining business applications and capabilities requirements, but we will be announcing more and there’ll be a national proposition for this,” he said.

“Healthcare professionals at the moment spend 73% doing non clinical facing tasks, documenting what they’ve done. So, we’ve got to put AVT as the catalyst, along with an AI agenda at the heart of transformation.

He said that transformation would require more than just providing licenses and “hoping it’s going to work”. 

“We’ve got to invest in our people, we’ve got to invest in change management, and improvement methodologies, because we know that science works,” he said.

Price-Forbes argued that while efficiency and productivity are “an important milestone” on the AI journey, “growth and innovation” are the destinations.

The challenge is to “move from pockets of excellence to consistent national standards, scale what works, redesign services around digital, and focus relentlessly on benefits, realisation, people being more productive, and a resilient NHS that delivers high quality, compassionate care for years to come,” he said.