University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust (UHL) has completed a transformative week of digital progress, delivering a major upgrade to its Nervecentre Electronic Patient Record system and beginning the carefully phased rollout of AI‑powered Ambient Voice Technology (AVT) to support clinical consultations.
These two initiatives place the Trust at the forefront of digital innovation in England, speeding up access to information, improving patient safety, and reducing the administrative burden on clinical teams over time.
The Nervecentre upgrade introduces digital clinical documentation for inpatients, while also extending electronic prescribing, and fully digitised ordering and reporting for imaging investigations such as X‑rays and CT scans to outpatient settings. These improvements mean clinicians can access clearer, more complete information at the point of care, helping to make admissions, treatment and discharge more efficient for patients.
AVT allows clinicians to spend more time caring for and communicating with patients, and less time on administration. The technology helps create a draft clinical note based on the consultation conversation, which clinicians then review, edit and approve.
Letters are then sent to the patient and GP, and also saved in their patient record, so those records are as up to date as possible and patients receive their letters straight away immediately.
The Trust has completed a full pilot as well as a learning and testing phase to ensure the system works for colleagues and for patients, and is now introducing AVT gradually across specialties.
Group Chief Digital Information Officer at UHL, Will Monaghan, praised the collective effort behind the achievements: “This is the result of many months of work by hundreds of digital, clinical, administrative and operational colleagues. Together, they have strengthened our Nervecentre EPR and begun the safe, phased rollout of AVT.
“Our ambition is to become a fully digitally enabled Trust, improving the quality of care and the experience of care for patients. We also want to make UHL an even better place to work by giving colleagues digital tools that genuinely help. I want to thank everyone involved for their commitment to making UHL a better place to receive and deliver care.”
