Using Dragon Medical One (DMO) and WinVoiceWeb frees up 40% more patient care time for NHS Lanarkshire’s SLT team

Background

NHS Lanarkshire is the third largest health board in Scotland, serving a population of 655,000 across rural and urban communities. It employs around 12,000 staff working in communities, health centres, clinics and offices and at three district general hospitals.

Its Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) staff faced issues with their document workflow that were negatively affecting patient waiting times and staff morale.

Theoretically, the workflow involved therapists dictating letters and reports onto analogue tapes which they would give to the site secretary. Documents were typed, emailed to therapists for verification and returned to secretaries who printed them out and sent them to recipients.

In reality, with a total of just 20 hours of admin support available at each of the three sites for acute and community teams, staff did not have the capacity meet the unrelenting demand for letters and reports. This was leading to lengthy turnaround times, and to therapists frequently typing and printing their own reports.

Vacancies in admin and therapist roles could not be filled and, in any case, limited office space meant that more admin staff could not be accommodated. Staff working remotely using analogue dictation also faced associated clinical governance risks.

Therapists and admin staff alike were well aware that the out-of-date, arduous system, exacerbated by high demand, was reducing their capacity to treat patients – leading to increased levels of stress across the team. One of the hospital teams was under particular pressure as sick leave and retirement led to them having no admin support for a sustained period. There was a drive to make the system more efficient so as to free up admin time for direct patient care, help reduce waiting times and relieve pressure on the teams.

A revolution in documentation

Voice Technologies assessed the current situation and recommended Dragon Medical One (DMO) with WinVoiceWeb. DMO is the world’s leading speech recognition software for healthcare professionals, enabling them to dictate reports, letters, emails and entries into clinical systems quickly and accurately.

WinVoiceWeb, designed by Voice Technologies in collaboration with the NHS, is a web-based end-to-end app for healthcare professionals to produce letters, reports and other documents and distribute them electronically or in print faster than ever before. It integrates seamlessly with DMO, allowing users to produce documents even faster.

The DMO and WinVoiceWeb system was initially used by NHS Lanarkshire’s SLT teams for report-writing. They very quickly recognised the impact that using it could have on speeding up other daily admin procedures, such as completing case notes and writing management reports.

Their therapists are now using DMO to turn reports around in half the time and manage their caseload on a daily basis, working both remotely and on site, using a mix of hand-held microphones and headsets.

The admin team has cut the time they spend on reports by up to 80% in some cases and 40% on average across 10 users over the course of one year. Turnaround time is down by an average of 55%. This frees up resources to carry out essential duties such as processing referrals and answering telephone calls more efficiently, speeding up the response time to patients and carers. Using WinVoiceWeb, reports are now available immediately on Clinical Portal in a designated SLT area and are instantly emailed to GPs.

Together, DMO and WinVoiceWeb have revolutionised the way that SLT service in NHS Lanarkshire works, and have improved staff morale.

Excellent support and advice

Voice Technologies supported the SLT management through the decision-making initial stages, explaining how the DMO and WinVoiceWeb system works, how to ensure a high level of return in terms of efficiency and productivity, and how it is tried and tested to integrate seamlessly with other NHS systems.

We then guided the admin team and therapists through the change over from analogue to digital. We provided tailored training, answering all their questions and working at the therapists’ own pace and level of IT understanding to help them overcome any fear of change by explaining clearly how to use the new system and training users to get the very most out of it.