Improving care, reducing costs

Trusts throughout Britain are reaping the rewards of using digital dictation and outsourced transcription services to increase their workload capacity and help the smooth running of their organisations, reports Richard Mackillican

Due to ever increasing demands on the capacity of NHS trusts, many are now seeking ways in which to streamline their operations, removing waste from patient pathways.

The idea of reducing the time it takes to move patients along care pathways is central, not only to hitting government targets such as the 18 week patient pathway, but also to the very core ambition of the health service to provide fast, effective healthcare at the point of need.

Although there are many areas of patient pathways which can be re-engineered to provide faster results, one area which has been proven to provide significant knock-on efficiency savings has been the area of dictation and transcription.

Through the use of more efficient technologies such as digital dictation, trusts have been able to reduce their overall transcription times by at least half. This has generated significant savings, both in time and money.

Through the use of digital dictation services, Brighton & Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust made a saving of £500,000 in nine months. Another example is Western Sussex NHS Trust who, by switching from analogue to digital dictation, managed to reduce their document turnaround times from 37 days to 48 hours (24 hours for urgent work) across 21 specialities.

Providers of digital dictation services will often also provide outsourced transcription services to cover secretarial work during trust employee absence or leave.

This means that instead of letting transcription backlogs build up when staff are away, trusts can simply arrange to have work outsourced to their digital dictation providers. Using this kind of outsourcing service can help trusts run smoothly and, more importantly, maintain high levels of care for patients by dealing efficiently with their paper work.

Nick Holding, service improvement manager at The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, said: “In the past, the trust has used outsourced transcriptions services on a few occasions to clear a backlog of dictations, which had developed due to unexpected staff sickness. We found that the service which we received was of a good standard and was returned within a reasonable timescale.”

In the event of a trust facing difficulties in recruiting medical secretaries, digital dictation providers can arrange for full scale transcription services to be outsourced.

This kind of service is only viable through the use of digital dictation. There would be little efficiency gained by posting hundreds of audio tapes through the post and many digital dictation providers are able to offer transcription services alongside their standard digital dictation packages.

By procuring additional transcription services through digital dictation providers, trusts are also then able to take advantage of the very latest digital dictation technology, along with the security of knowing that many transcription service providers have clean track records in regards to data protection.

This means that trusts which use these services have the peace of mind knowing that their transcriptions will be carried out securely and on time whilst delivering improved patient care and efficiency savings.