Document turnaround time at NHS Tayside’s Dundee Dental Hospital transformed by Dragon Medical One, Philips SpeechMikes and WinVoicePro

Background

Dundee Dental Hospital and School is home to NHS Tayside Specialist Dental Services working with the University of Dundee and some emergency dental care services. The hospital provides a unique range of dental services for the people of Tayside, with consultant-led dental specialties providing treatment for around 61,000 attendances each year.

The hospital generates large volumes of time sensitive clinical correspondence and its document workflow system was struggling to cope with demands. On average, the hospital spent over 600 hours per year generating and sending important patient correspondence.

The hospital had two objectives: to speed up document turnaround time and to reduce the typing required from administrative staff.

Combining best-in-class recording devices, cloud-based clinical speech recognition and our document workflow app

Voice Technologies addressed the need to improve the document turnaround time by combining new digital dictation devices and speech recognition software with WinVoicePro, our electronic document workflow application developed in collaboration with the NHS.

NHS Tayside first installed WinVoicePro in 2010. The electronic document approval process enabled by WinVoicePro has been calculated to save NHS Tayside 63p per document through a reduction in printing and distribution costs. With the Board sending an average of 432,500 documents electronically per annum, the saving to NHS Tayside is over £250,000 every year.

To accurately capture the spoken words of the hospital’s 20 consultant orthodontists, we supplied SpeechMike Premium dictation microphones from Philips. These best-in-class handheld digital microphones have features specifically designed for the healthcare sector such as a free floating, decoupled microphone for precise recording, antimicrobial housing and buttons and a trackball for integrated mouse function.

Combined with these user-friendly devices, we installed Nuance’s secure, cloud-based speech recognition software, Dragon Medical One. Easy to install and maintain, the software accurately converts spoken words into text which it transforms into a document for amendment, approval and dispatch via WinVoicePro. Manual transcription by administration staff in no longer required.

Installation and training was conducted remotely by our team of experts to support infection control during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This combination of state-of-the-art hardware and software allows orthodontists to create and verify their own documents. Using WinVoicePro, verified letters are electronically uploaded into patient records with copies also being sent to patients if required. This significantly reduces the typing time required for admin staff leading to faster distribution of letters to patients and other health care professionals.

Post installation, turnaround time for generating six months’ worth of patient correspondence went from 338 hours to 148 hours, a reduction of more than 55%.