Could you ever confuse a cooker with a cougar? It might sound unlikely, but it is a real life example of where two words sound similar enough to confuse voice recognition software. That’s where our expert transcriptionists come in to help make sure that patient notes are accurate.
Tracey Sopp, our Managing Director, saw our experts at work on a virtual visit to our Digital Dictation Team who transcribe thousands of hours of important medical notes for clinical teams at Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust (CNTW). The visit was part of a regular series that our Managing Director does and was the first to take place online. Since Covid the teams have been working from home and have now moved to permanent homeworking which is proving a success for the team.
They are responsible for transcribing tens of thousands of hours of important medical notes which saves clinical teams precious time they can redirect to patient care. The service operates 24 hours a day 7 days a week and gets great feedback from customers across CNTW. Tracey saw a demonstration of the dictation process and heard how the team work to an accuracy rate of 99% within a tight turnaround time. They battle background noise from dogs barking to the Formula 1 racing and even other clinicians in the same office dictating notes at the same time.
As the team now all work from home they use Microsoft Teams to keep in touch with each other and recreate some of the feeling of being in the office together. Tracey heard if people come across something they are not sure about they send a message to everyone and people are quick to step in and help. Home working also means that when the teams are short people can jump online and help without travelling, and the travel before and after a night shift is not needed either.
Tracey heard how people join the team with a range of experience and the key things are accuracy, precision and some common sense. She heard how the work is varied and interesting and how the shifts fly by as people are concentrating on what they are doing. It’s a testament to the success of the team that they get requests from clinical teams to use digital dictation, leading to more work for the team and saving clinical staff even more time.
