London NHS trusts to roll out AI scribing to 20,000 clinicians

Four NHS trusts in south west London will roll out AI-scribing to 20,000 clinicians across the region in a large-scale deployment of the technology.

AI-scribing, also known as ambient voice technology (AVT), captures clinician–patient conversations and uses AI to generate real-time transcriptions and clinical summaries.

The contact between Lyrebird Health and the South West London Acute Provider Collaborative will cover St George’s University Hospitals, Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals, Croydon Health Services, and Kingston and Richmond NHS Foundation Trust. 

Lyrebird is integrated with the Oracle Cerner Millennium electronic patient record (EPR) system shared by the four trusts, enabling entry of clinical notes directly into patient records, AI-powered form population, and automated access to demographics, medications and medical history.

Martin Ellis, chief digital information officer at South West London Integrated Care System (ICS), said: “We’re proud to be partnering with South West London to support clinicians across multiple trusts with technology that genuinely makes day-to-day clinical work easier. 

“There’s been a shared understanding from the start that for this deployment to succeed, it has to be safe, deeply-integrated, and genuinely helpful to clinicians. 

“We’re looking forward to working closely with teams across the trusts to support clinicians as they start using Lyrebird in day-to-day care.

“ South West London prioritised this because we recognise that ambient AI gives clinicians time back for care while improving data quality. 

“We know clinicians are already seeking out these tools; by providing a scaled, safe, and EPR-integrated solution, we are ensuring innovation is supported by IT and clinical governance.” 

The deployment will also introduce automated clinical coding and referral to treatment (RTT) automation, allowing clinical codes to be generated directly from consultation content and capturing RTT pathway data without manual intervention.

By automating documentation for clinicians, the South West London Acute Provider Collaborative aims to return thousands of hours to patient care.

It aims to onboard 10,000 clinicians in the first year of deployment, eventually scaling to the full 20,000 over four years.

It follows a joint procurement of AI-scribing software from Accurx at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust and University Hospitals of Northamptonshire Group, which will be used by 10,000 clinicians across acute and community hospitals in the region.

Matthew Laundy, chief clinical information officer at South West London ICS, said: “It’s going to make a huge difference to the working lives of clinicians, making them able to generate letters far more quickly, documentation far more quickly which, at the moment, is a huge admin burden on clinicians, which leads to some very poor quality documentation, which can impact on patient safety.” 

Lyrebird Health is one of 19 suppliers included on NHS England’s self-certified AVT registry, which launched in January.

The firm’s technology was part of a pilot of AVT at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which found that 87% of users saved time on admin tasks. The pilot also included Accurx Scribe, Heidi, and TORTUS.