Two SRC dictation implementations help West Midlands Trusts to Lean award success

London, 6 December 2010 – SRC, a leading provider of document creation and clinical information solutions, today announced that two West Midlands based NHS Trusts have won Lean Healthcare Awards in recognition of the efficiency benefits delivered by their SRC digital dictation implementations:

• The Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust was awarded the ‘Best Sustained Project’ for digital dictation.
• University Hospital North Staffordshire NHS Trust won the ‘Organisation of the Year’ category for their Transformation Programme.

Royal Wolverhampton and University Hospital North Staffordshire are both using the Winscribe digital dictation technology provided by SRC across the entire Trusts – totalling more than 1,600 users.

The Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust won the ‘Best Sustained Project’ award, having last year won the Lean award for innovation for the pilot of digital dictation. This year their submission focused on how the Trust has been able to improve efficiencies following Trust Wide roll out and the benefits they have achieved through the SRC solution.

Nina White, Service Improvement Manager at the Trust said, “It’s fantastic to win two years running. This award is testament to such a successful project and the proactive efforts of our staff. The automated routing functionality, outlook style interface and speed of implementation meant we simply couldn’t fail to reduce the time taken to produce and send clinical correspondence. The dictation solution is now fully embedded across the whole trust and we are seeing some fabulous efficiency gains, as well as the ability to see, manage and plan demand against capacity.”

Nina added, “The Winscribe solution from SRC has been the biggest technology break-through for the Medical Secretaries across the Trust. The solution allows many of the specialties to stay within the Trust’s target of 48 hour turnaround as it is clearly visible to all secretaries which letters are priority. This in turn leads to excellent teamwork and improved efficiency.”

The Winscribe digital dictation system is now in use at nearly 60 NHS Trusts across the UK. One of the main reasons for its popularity has been the solutions ability to automate time consuming processes that cause delays in dictating and typing documents.

University Hospital North Staffordshire, who won the ‘Organisation of the Year’ award, have been able to change from using tapes, and in doing so have automated 15 time consuming steps in the dictation, typing and overall document creation process.

Heidi Poole, Transformation Project Manager at UHNS said: “This award recognises the efforts the teams have made and shows the substantial changes we have made across the Trust. The new dictation solution has reduced delays in communication and as a result has improved patient pathway and treatment times. All 29 specialities are seeing the improvement. In a number of cases dictations are transcribed whilst consultants are still in the same clinic.”

Chris Hart, CEO at SRC said: “Over the last five years SRC has made significant investments into the services and solutions for deployment within the NHS. SRC can therefore ensure that NHS Trusts maximise the efficiency gains and patient care improvements available from the deployment of digital dictation and related technologies – it’s not enough just to replace analogue tapes with a digital dictation system. It’s fantastic that our implementations have helped two existing customers win such prestigious awards under the ‘lean’ standards of practice.

“Our customers have a variety of different requirements from their dictation and document creation solutions. SRC along with the Winscribe technology is able to offer the flexibility to support these diverse needs, including outsourcing transcription with multiple providers, clinical correspondence systems and full integration with legacy healthcare systems. SRC is committed to expanding its portfolio of healthcare solutions and growing its market share over the coming years. These awards show that our solutions are making a significant difference in the numerous organisations where they are being used.”

The awards come on the back of the success SRC has enjoyed in the West Midlands. Already seven Trusts in the region are using SRC’s digital dictation and speech recognition solutions, including University Hospitals Birmingham, Dudley Group of Hospitals and. Birmingham Children’s Hospital.

SRC is the preferred supplier of digital dictation in the region under the HPC (Healthcare Purchasing Consortium) framework agreement, which was won in 2008. The framework enables member Trusts to speed up procurement by using a central contract – please see http://www.hpc.nhs.uk/ for details.