NHS Forth Valley is one of the 14 regional Health Boards in Scotland. It provides healthcare services in the Clackmannanshire, Falkirk and Stirling areas. NHS Forth Valley has its headquarters in Castle Business Park, Stirling, serving a population of more than 306,000 in a diverse geographical area which covers the heart of Scotland.
The Health Board comprises of Forth Valley Royal Hospital that is one of the most advanced and well equipped in Europe and is supported by a network of four community hospitals and 56 Primary Care sites employing 8,000 staff.
NHS Forth Valley first rolled out the MediSpeech solution and has recently decided to upgrade versions to SpeechReport across the Health Board. SpeechReport enables users to utilise digital dictation, speech recognition and transcription to create their medical correspondence. It is also a complete workflow management solution that streamlines correspondence enabling the creation, adaption and management of documentation in one central platform.
NHS Forth Valley upgraded from MediSpeech to SpeechReport for digital dictation and transcription. They are currently working towards letter creation within SpeechReport.
Project implementation
We spoke with Carol Clayton, ICT/ eHealth Project Manager, who has overseen the implementation, roll out and successful management of the upgrade to SpeechReport across NHS Forth Valley. When asked how the implementation has gone Carol replied: “The upgrade to SpeechReport started in January 2020 and was completed by the end of April. Working with G2 Speech has been great and the staff are very responsive. The lines of communication are open all the time and we had weekly project calls with our project team that included all the stakeholders and G2 Speech’s project team.
We had clear communication from the offset internally about how this upgrade would be rolled out across all departments. Each department had a timescale of when they would switch across to SpeechReport and weekly communications went out reminding them of this. Trainers and Systems Administrators were on hand in each department to answer any questions during this transition and to support the clinicians.
We have also created our own e-Learning internally to help educate users about the changes between the two systems. Since the upgrade, feedback from users has been very positive. The secretaries were really impressed with the new functionalities such as the advanced filtering for documents awaiting transcription.”
Since using SpeechReport, NHS Forth Valley has created over 37,000 documents in three months and has been successfully rolled out to 55 departments, including Cardiology, Pathology, General Surgery and Paediatrics across a number of sites.
The future
Going forward the Health Board is looking at extending SpeechReport functionalities with G2 Analytics. G2 Analytics allows healthcare professionals to collect, analyse and report on operational and clinical data. These insights provide essential information to make the most effective decisions in the best interests of the Board, healthcare professionals and most importantly the patient. When asked about their future plans Carol replied: “Having just had the G2 Analytics training we are hoping to use this in the very near future.”