Enhancing mobile working
Recently Worcester used GDE funding to equip its healthcare workforce with clinical speech recognition to support remote working, reduce clinical documentation workload, eliminate the backlog of reporting associated with detailed patient records and replace legacy, slow analogue dictation workflows with the goal of freeing up healthcare workers to focus on patient care.
Lifting the burden
Many of the community and mental health teams make extensive notes to capture the patient story and the context of their clients’/patients’ care. These notes are vital in communication with colleagues in multi-disciplinary health and care teams to ensure continuity of care and to meet child protection, medico-legal and other social care requirements.
With no back-office administration support, many of the team were spending long hours capturing patient records, writing GP letters and other clinical documentation. The results of this were people going home late or producing abbreviate notes which in turn were difficult for others to interpret or caused duplication of effort.
Its personal
The introduction of clinical speech recognition has boosted mobile working by reducing the burden of paperwork and backlog of administration amongst paediatricians, psychiatrists, community and mental health nurses and
AHPs working with their patients in the community. For one occupational therapist in particular, clinical speech recognition has changed not just her own working life. With her renewed enthusiasm for technology the effects have ripped down to positively impact on her patients too.
Leading by example
The success of Worcester’s technology investments for its mobile health workforce has come under the scrutiny of NHS England and NHS Digital. The lessons learned from use of speech recognition within the clinical documentation workflow will be communicated to and showcased for other community and mental health trusts.
