NHS Tayside has become the first NHS organisation in the UK to use Voice Technologies’ WinVoicePro to correspond electronically between all clinics and GP practices – saving more than £250,000 per year.

WinVoicePro software allows the health board to route documents, once approved by clinicians, directly to GPs electronically, avoiding lengthy and expensive conventional postage.

The electronic document approval process has been calculated to save NHS Tayside 63p per document through a reduction in printing and distribution costs. With the board sending an average of 432,500 documents per annum, the saving to NHS Tayside is more than £250,000; excluding the saving in associated staff costs.

The contract with NHS Tayside was negotiated under the National Framework Agreement, with Voice Technologies being the sole supplier for the NHS in Scotland.

After a successful pilot, Voice Technologies’ dictation solutions will be rolled out across the Walton Centre NHS Foundation Trust.

WinScribe dictation management software and WinVoicePro software, which speeds up the generation of letters from dictation, was first introduced into the specialist Liverpool-based Neurosciences Trust in October 2010. The centre was so pleased with the success of the software that all areas of the organisation will now benefit from the software solutions following full roll out at the end of January.

“The Walton centre is benefiting from our wide range of experience in implementing these solutions across Scotland,” explained Heather Wylie, managing director of Voice Technologies. “And subject to a small amount of customisation, other trusts in England can benefit from our experience as well.”

NHS Ayrshire and Arran will be the first health board in Scotland to benefit from Voice Technologies’ leading digital technology solutions becoming integrated with the new national Patient Administration System (PAS) TrakCare.

Both WinScribe and WinVoicePro from Voice Technologies, which will be rolled out across NHS Ayrshire & Arran, will work seamlessly with the PAS software via the Ensemble integration engine from Intersystems, to improve the efficiency of the health board, as well as saving it money.

Speech recognition is set to be the next efficiency-boosting capability for 2011, thanks to exciting new software developed by Voice Technologies.

The company has launched a speech recognition demonstration application. This has been integrated into WinVoicePro to further accelerate the generation (from dictation) and verification (by electronic communication) of vital documents such as letters.

Under the NHS National Framework for Digital Dictation and Speech Recognition in Scotland, demographic interfaces are available to link leading dictation solutions with a wide range of patient administration systems.

These include any SQL-based systems, such as TOPAS, and any Oracle-based systems such as Oasis, along with SCI-Store and InterSystems’ TrakCare. Document output interfaces are also available to send the verified documents to electronic patient record/document management systems or directly to GP recipients with the following systems being supported: PCTI’s EDT/Docman, SCI-Store and SCI-Gateway.

Interfaces under the framework for Yorkshire and Humber includes SCI Gateway, Cerner Millennium, McKesson, PCTi’s EDT, Intersystems TrakCare.

NHS Highlands and Islands sites won’t just be benefiting from dictation management software WinScribe recently installed by Voice Technologies – they will also see major savings from the company’s WinVoicePro software in 2011.

The dictation solution that speeds up the generation of documents will save the health board an estimated 63p every time a letter is created and sent electronically through the system.

Since deploying WinVoicePro in September 2010, the Golden Jubilee Hospital in Clydebank has achieved a 66% average reduction in document distribution times – from three days to under 12 hours. The hospital first selected WinScribe from Voice Technologies a year ago and, following the successful adoption of the software, WinVoicePro was deployed in September.

Now allowing documents to be verified and amended electronically, the software offers multiple sign-off options for discharge summaries to help secretarial staff secure approvals faster. The use of WinVoicePro has also allowed Golden Jubilee to start creating an electronic patient data warehouse where final patient documents are securely stored alongside diagnostic test results and lab reports.