The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust and Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust have announced Heidi as their preferred supplier for ambient voice technology following a “successful pilot of the solution in a number of departments”.
The eight month pilot introduced the technology across the Walsall Healthcare emergency department, medical same day emergency care, dermatology, ENT and audiology, as well as obstetrics and gynaecology. Here, clinicians used Heidi’s solution to generate structured clinical notes from patient consultations, reviewing and approving prior to their addition to the patient record.
Findings showed that the solution worked to reduce clinician documentation time to less than four minutes per patient over the pilot phase. Jamil Aslam, lead for quality improvement and AVT at Walsall Healthcare, said: “By using ambient voice technology responsibly, we have been able to reduce the time staff spend on documentation and give them more time with the people who matter most – our patients.”
Roll out of the technology is set to begin across emergency departments and outpatient specialties at both trusts, with plans for it to be live in all areas by 2028, the trusts note.
Simon Evans, group deputy chief executive and chief strategy officer, spoke of the trusts’ commitment to adopting innovative digital solutions to improve the patient experience, adding: “The implementation of ambient voice technology will support our clinicians to deliver patient care by reducing the administrative burden, giving them back more time during a consultation to focus on each patient’s needs.”
Wider trend: AVT
Kingston and Richmond NHS Foundation Trust has begun its rollout of Lyrebird Health AVT, initially in the emergency department, gastroenterology, and gynaecology outpatients. The trust has been working in partnership with other South West London trusts and the SWL Acute Provider Collaborative to introduce AVT, the board noted earlier this year. A second phase of the rollout is also planned, to include more outpatient specialties and community services, followed by other clinical areas, Kingston and Richmond shares. Deployment is being coordinated with partner organisations across the region to promote consistency in approach.
Digital Health and Care Wales is launching a £10 million open framework agreement for AVT solutions, aiming to support the adoption of tech to improve clinical documentation processes. The agreement is intended to maintain a “pre-qualified list” of AVT suppliers, who will have to meet conditions enabling their participation and achieve a minimum evaluation threshold. According to DHCW, AVT solutions could include ambient voice capture, speech-to-text transcription, generative AI summarisation, suggested structured clinical coding, intelligent summarisation, automated template population, review and approval workflows, integration with GP systems, and insights and reporting.
The Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB) has launched an investigation into the use of AVT in hospitals, following engagement with stakeholders including representatives from national bodies that highlighted potential safety issues. The investigation looks to explore the ways in which the use of AVT has contributed, or may contribute to, patient harm, along with the wider patient safety risks of its use, and how accountability for AVT safety is understood on a local and national level. According to HSSIB, it will use a specific analysis framework developed for generic AI systems to make its assessment.
