Dictate.IT, part of Clanwilliam, a global healthcare technology and services group, has added an AI-powered clinical assistant to its market leading clinical documentation software products. The assistant listens to and transcribes the doctor-patient conversations in real-time, automatically creating consultation summaries, clinical notes and clinical documentation from the conversation transcript. The assistant saves time for healthcare professionals, reducing the burden of administration and allowing clinicians to spend more time on patient care.
The assistant is fully integrated with existing Dictate.IT clinical documentation products, so clinicians can start using it straight away, avoiding the need for busy hospitals to implement new software.
Dictate.IT is committed to the highest levels of security and privacy, meaning that no healthcare data is passed to a third party service for processing, and all healthcare data is stored within Dictate.IT’s own secure environment in the UK.
At every stage, the healthcare professional remains in control. They can check notes and clinical documentation against the transcript, and use a ‘smart recommendations’ option to identify points at which more information or investigation is required.
Stuart van Rooyen, managing director of Clanwilliam (UK), said: “We’re delighted to be bringing an innovative, AI-powered clinical assistant to our UK hospital customers.
“We’ve been focused on giving doctors back valuable time through speech-to-text functionality for many years. Leveraging AI to create accurate doctor-patient conversation transcripts, consultation summaries, clinical notes and clinical documentation is a natural evolution of our expertise.
“We look forward to working together with our customers on how to best leverage our innovations to solve their challenges and free up their valuable time.”
The launch of the new technology comes at a time when the NHS is under huge pressure, and there is an intense need for tools to improve productivity, while addressing staff burnout, and delivering a more personalised service for patients.
In England, new health and social care secretary Wes Streeting has made a “move from analogue to digital” one of his three pillars for healthcare reform, and digital solutions are expected to feature heavily in the ten-year plan for the NHS expected next spring.
NHS staff have called for “long overdue” investments in health technology, and in a recent survey by the Health Foundation, 81% of respondents were in favour of its use for administrative tasks.
Dictate.IT’s AI-powered clinical assistant aligns with these developments. It acts as an intelligent virtual note taker, dramatically improving consultation efficiency by automating the documentation of patient interactions, creating appropriate and clinically relevant summaries, and integrating with the EPR or clinical system.
The assistant can be used with every doctor-patient consultation. Capturing and structuring data from these consultations is important for compliance, quality measures, care continuity, and in many cases reimbursement.
But traditionally it is also a multi-step process that takes time away from seeing patients. While many providers are exploring the use speech-to-text and natural language processing to streamline this process, generative AI helps take the workflow one step further.
By harnessing Dictate.IT’s investment in cutting edge, medically specific generative AI, recorded consultations can be turned to clinical notes and documentation that is ready to use within the clinical workflow.
The technology is available right now for NHS trusts and private hospitals.
