An ambient voice technology programme hosted by East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust, is to offer selected hospices across England a free six month trial to access the CLEARnotes tool.
The initiative is said to provide both inpatient and community hospice services with access to the AVT tool, capable of listening to clinical conversations and automatically create medical notes and documentation.
Hospices can claim up to 30 licenses for the tool, accompanied by funded implementation support and training. Following six months of free use, organisations will only be expected to pay to continue use where they have observed measurable improvements in productivity and efficiency.
East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust’s pre-operative department has reportedly achieved a 14 percent increase in productivity since implementing the solution, whilst The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust’s pre-operative service demonstrated a 25 percent increase in productivity within a clinic.
CIO Tony McDonald, East Lancashire Hospitals, commented: “End-of-life care is built on trust, empathy and meaningful human connection. By reducing the time clinicians spend documenting conversations, this programme aims to give back valuable time for patients, families and carers during some of life’s most challenging moments. We are proud to host this opportunity, helping healthcare professionals focus on what matters most, delivering compassionate, person-centred care.”
Wider trend: Ambient voice technology
HTN was joined for a deep dive into AVT by a fantastic panel including Wahida Jabarzai, clinical AI and automation delivery lead at University Hospitals of Northamptonshire and University Hospitals of Leicester; and Ravinder Kaur Sahota, group CIO at The Dudley Group and Sandwell and West Birmingham. Our panel shared their learnings, experiences, and insights from AVT projects, covering clinical impact, risks, coding, governance, regulation, assurance, through to implementation, value, benefits realisation, and sustainability.
University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust has issued a preliminary market engagement notice outlining its intent to procure an ambient voice technology solution with an estimated value of £500,000. The solution sought is expected to meet a number of requirements, including having generative AI capabilities to support clinical and operational documentation, ambient voice capture, speech-to-text transcription, generative AI summarisation, clinical documentation generation, and structured template outputs. The trust also hopes to find a solution that can demonstrate functionality across meeting summarisation, action extraction, letter and document creation, and integration with UHB’s homegrown PICS EPR.
University Hospitals of Leicester and University Hospitals of Northamptonshire have awarded a £1.9 million contract to Accurx for the provision of its ambient voice technology solution. The award follows a competitive procurement that saw a total of five tenders evaluated, according to the trusts, seeking to find a supplier capable of implementing and deploying AVT to support both clinical and non-clinical documentation across multiple hospital sites. The solution will be used to capture consultations and draft documents such as clinical notes, summaries, and letters, to be reviewed by clinicians for accuracy before being sent out to patients.
