Earlier this week, we were lucky enough to take part in the Healthcare Efficiency Through Technology event, part of the UK Health Show which was held at the Olympia in London. This one day event, now in its sixth year of existence, offers healthcare professionals the opportunity to join senior NHS leaders and commissioners to discuss the £4.2billion investment in NHS IT as we move towards the patient centred form of care in 2020.
As longstanding exhibitors at the event, each year we find the exhibition to be extremely helpful in meeting and engaging with our customers and other like-minded healthcare professionals.
This year’s event had a host of great speakers including representatives from NHS Digital, NHS England, the NHS Leadership Academy, NHS London Procurement Partnership and many more.
At the G2 Speech exhibition stand this year we had an array of demonstrations available and a line-up of our most experienced staff. Demonstrations of our complete document creation solution including:
- SpeechReport, our enterprise workflow management platform with outsourcing capabilities
- SpeechReport Cursor, providing speech recognition for any text field including Microsoft Word and Outlook
- G2 Analytics, our reporting tool which helps to keep track of KPIs including turnaround times, backlogs and more
- Our mobility suite – providing information access whilst on the go!
The doors opened at 9am and there were huge queues of healthcare professionals from across the UK and Northern Ireland waiting for their place at the event. Over 4,000 people were through the door by 9.30am!
The event itself was crammed full of discussions on how technology and digital working can and is already transforming ways of working. Having worked in the healthcare industry now for almost 10 years – some of the items addressed during the day really did seem quite marvellous. Even now, working in the technology field it still amazes me how much things have changed over the course of the last 20 years. We’ve come such a long, long way from where we used to be.
My background is in the field of mental health and whilst working for a Trust, as part of the NHS 60 celebrations, we looked back at the time of asylums and photographs of people hand signing old patient records. They were quite literally written with a fountain pen and looked to be similar to a signing in book. At events like this, it really does highlight the contrast to where we are heading. The change is happening and I can only see technology continuing to evolve. The technologies around us and where the industry is heading – really is nothing less than incredible. Healthcare is on a journey of becoming more personalised and user-centred – the way it should be.
Technologies are becoming more sophisticated and intelligent every day. It was interesting to hear how other partners are also looking towards decision support tools to help clinicians when making clinical recommendations and diagnoses. There were some fascinating demonstrations on wearable technologies, virtual care and personalised computing in health too.
Definitely worth checking out in 2017!