Dr James Reed, Chief Clinical Officer at Birmingham & Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust shares experiences on the organisation’s transition from analogue dictation to electronic for recorded clinical data, and the increased productivity and wider visibility that has come with the change.

Video Transcript:

What were the key factors that led to the adoption of BigHand Technology Solutions?
Over the history, unfortunately, big changes often follow big crises. We had a crisis where somebody lost a tape containing some confidential patient information, this was quite a number of years ago, and this was in the context of we were already being under pressure because we'd had some difficulties with information governance, and so on. And this really, it was almost like the final straw. It was quite clear to everyone that we couldn't allow this to happen again. So what we needed was a wholesale change in the way we handled loss any recorded clinical data and dictation more generally. So the obvious thing to do was to move from an old fashioned tape based system to something well, even then this is pretty revolutionary being fully electronic.

Which BigHand products are you using and why?
So we're using the standard BigHand offering, which is an electronic transcription system. So the clinicians, usually doctors but not always, will use one or other a few different devices, it might be a mobile phone, or it might be a USB microphone, or it might be a dictation machine. Just to record their letters or any other clinical information they like as per usual. And then it's submitted electronically to their secretary, or into a work list which their secretary will access but which can also be shared between other admin staff. The Secretary then type the letter in the traditional way as it happens, and then it goes back via one of our other systems to the person for checking in and sign off.

What benefits have you experiences since the adoption of BigHand Voice?
I mean, in the short term, there's obvious thing that the quality of the recordings is dramatically better because we were using old worn out machines and old worn out tapes. Sometimes they would get stuck or the recording would be distorted or you couldn't hear it. So all of that changed immediately and suddenly, you had a very good quality recordings that could easily be listened to and transcribed. Then you had the speed. So the minute that the recording was finished on the device, wherever the dictation was, it would immediately appear on the Secretary's work list. And then also the ability to reallocate works and secretaries for example, to very easily move jobs between themselves if someone was off sick or have some kind of spare capacity.

What is your experience of BigHand as a company?
It has been interesting to work with them over the time actually, because we've gone from it. Yeah, I mean, I think they've grown quite a lot themselves over the eight or nine years we've been dealing with them now. They've been available. They've had some good ideas about what to do and they've given us some good advice so far. I'm also keen to kind of almost rediscover what the product can do because we've got used to it doing one thing and then the inter an awful lot has happened that we're not really up to date with so I'm excited to see what we can do and what they now have