An AI transcript tool is being piloted at The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, with hopes of reducing the administrative burden for clinicians by generating notes of doctor-patient conversations.
The NHS England funded pilot is testing the use of the CLEARNotes tool, that reportedly generates a structured discussion summary from conversations, at New Cross Hospital for anaesthetic assessments. Dr Yat Li, consultant anaesthetist and CCIO, points to its potential to “transform the way we deliver and improve care for our patients while releasing valuable time back to clinical staff”.
Dr Manpreet Singh, consultant anaesthetist and perioperative medicine lead, added: “I feel CLEARnotes can bring the benefits of reducing administrative burden and allow more clinical time to be spent with patients. The time spared can be used in anaesthetic note reviews in clinic to avoid last-minute postponements, which will improve theatre productivity.”
The trust has voiced hopes that use of the tool, which has been co-designed with NHS clinicians, can be expanded to support wider NHS teams, reducing administrative burdens on a larger scale and offering improvements for patient flow.
Driving efficiencies with AI across health and care
In a HTN Now panel discussion earlier this year, we looked at the role of digital in supporting NHS reform – modernising services, shifting from hospital to community, and supporting the move from reactive to proactive care. We welcomed Dawn Greaves, associate director of digital transformation at Leeds Community Healthcare; Ananya Datta, associate director of primary care digital delivery at South East London ICS; and Stuart Stocks, lead enterprise architect with Aire Logic. Panel members shared their insight and experience from a wide range of digital projects, highlighting what worked well and their learnings; how their organisations are currently tackling key challenges such as capacity and demand, and managing waiting lists; and balancing risk with innovation.
A separate panel discussion on putting Lord Darzi’s report into action also reflected on innovation in the NHS, the challenges and missed opportunities; and the role of digital and tech in driving change. Panellists included Lee Rickles, CIO, director & deputy SIRO at Humber Teaching Hospitals; Andrew Jones, digital transformation leader at Amazon Web Services; Tracy McClelland, CCIO at Dedalus; and Dan Bunstone, clinical director at Warrington Innovation Network and Warrington ICB. The discussion touched upon the use of AI in driving productivity and efficiency, including through ambient listening technology and implementing AI-driven triage to help with prioritisation.
HTN covered the launch of Microsoft Dragon Copilot, an AI assistant for clinical workflow, bringing together natural language voice dictation and ambient listening capabilities “with fine-tuned generative AI and healthcare-adapted safeguards”, said to support documentation, surfacing important information, and task automation. Examples of functionality available to clinicians include the ability to create clinical documentation, with Copilot capturing patient-clinician conversations and orders, converting them into “high quality, comprehensive, specialty-specific notes”.
