Crunch time

Today’s integration projects are all about delivering higher quality, more efficient services – and they have to justify themselves in financial terms. Daloni Carlisle reports.

Talk to the machine

The business of producing discharge summaries is also raised by Alistair Graham, sales and technical director at Voice Technologies. At one level, generating letters is a systems integration job; enabling a doctor to pull relevant information off the electronic patient record and put it into a document for the GP.

But that’s only part of the piece. The document also has to be managed - dictated, formatted, approved, corrected, dispatched. It is only once this is automated that the added value of monitoring for quality can be added in. “We view this as a process,” says Graham. “Getting a platform for digital dictation is one step. Moving to integration is next and then finally you can add speech recognition.”

And at each step along the way, suppliers will be telling trusts that they can deliver the savings that managers so desperately need to make.