Another NHS Foundation Trust Elects to Go with BigHand Digital Dictation
After a competitive tender process and a comparative pilot with two solutions, Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust has chosen BigHand for a trustwide digital dictation project, incorporating more than 300 users across all specialties.
The initial project was rolled out to authors and secretaries in orthopedics and general medicine to establish whether digital dictation and speech recognition could provide an easy-to-use and reliable solution to improving efficiency and management of work within the trust.
The introduction of the national referral to treatment waiting time of 18 weeks for the majority of patients to be treated within an NHS trust, (from the GP referral being received in the trust to the start of treatment) has meant that it is imperative to improve the turnaround time for clinical documents. BigHand technology will help eliminate the detrimental effect that using analogue tapes had. Consultants will now have the ability to prioritize specific dictations based on clinical need with instant transmission from dictation to the typing queue rather than the constant worry about lost or damage tapes. Secretaries will be able to manage their workload more effectively by sharing the work across specialties enabling the Trust to have full confidence in the fact that patient clinical letters will be turned around within the targets set, helping the patient through their treatment pathway.
After receiving a good rating for quality of services and an excellent rating for its use of resources through the Care Quality Commission, the implementation of digital dictation will enable the trust to further help remove costly and time consuming administrative duties, allowing hospital staff to concentrate more fully on their clinical requirements, ensuring national targets are continually met.
“We elected to go down the route of a competitive tender in order to get a better understanding of the digital dictation suppliers that were out there in the healthcare market, explained John Mills, head of procurement at Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust. "After a strict and thorough evaluation, including piloting two solutions, we chose BigHand as our preferred supplier. Our choice was based on the quality of the product as well as the unique ability to be able to deal directly with the developer and not a reseller.”
As well as supplying core digital dictation and speech recognition requirements, BigHand anticipates introducing remote working capabilities to the trust with the BigHand for BlackBerry smartphones module in the near future to help assist clinical staff who are constantly on the move.
Other NHS Trusts thathave already invested in BigHand technology include Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Guy’s & St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Trust, The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust, The Mid-Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, The Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust, Airedale NHS Trust, and Basildon & Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.