Julian Birtwell, Practice Manager explains how the speech recognition software has benefited his practice:

“We have been using speech recognition for nearly three years now and there is no doubt it has helped with driving out inefficiencies within our practice. We have six doctors using it - four partners and two registrars.

We have been able to cut our costs considerably by reviewing and fine tuning the whole workflow. Before the introduction of speech recognition we used to go through the process of the doctor dictating his letters, passing it to the secretary who often struggled to understand part of it. She would make a draft and pass it back to the doctor, who would read it through when he had time, alter it and then it would go back for another draft, and if we were lucky that would be the last of it.

Now, the doctor’s dictation produces the letters and puts them straight into the clinical system, either while with the patient or soon after the consultation. The secretary simply tidies up their efforts. The letter is dispatched very much quicker, usually within 24 hours, which greatly benefits the patient. Plus we save an enormous amount of time, paper and energy.

It has also enabled us to comply much better with Choose & Book. We now manage Choose & Book rather than the other way around. And every practice manager and secretary just loves Choose & Book!

I've saved on average about 15 hours a week of secretarial time. Although I definitely made cost savings I chose to redeploy this within the front desk team to the benefit of the whole practice.

The most important thing to remember is that Practices need to look at the whole reception/admin/secretarial workflow to drive out the potential benefits.”