High volume letter production made simple with TalkingPoint for Clinics

Cambridgeshire Community Services’ musculoskeletal assessment and treatment service (MATS) triages large numbers of patients who may require orthopaedic care. The service has implemented the use of “TalkingPoint for Clinics”, the speech recognition workflow, to speed up letter production.

“The use of TalkingPoint has been a revelation within my clinical practice,” comments Nicola Wilson, ESP Podiatrist. “By cutting out superfluous steps within the admin process, it has helped facilitate an extremely prompt and efficient referral pathway for patient care and has proven to be a worthwhile investment.”

Nicola continues: “We produce a huge amount of letters to refer our patients for hospital care. I will typically see around 14 patients during a clinic session and produce 2 letters per patient on average. There are 6 clinicians in the team now so we collectively produce 300-400 letters or more per week. The MATS GP specialist typically sees 23 patients per day and records patient notes by voice using TalkingPoint in addition to producing an average of 2 letters per patient.”

The service was previously using analogue dictation. Rachel Jakings, MATS Administrator explains: “The decision to use TalkingPoint was to save time – time saved by the clinicians not having to send tapes to the admin team and time saved by us not having to send draft letters back to the clinician for checking”. TalkingPoint has eliminated the double handling of correspondence.

To further support the MATS letter production workflow, GHG Software provided an automation solution whereby TalkingPoint automatically creates a task in the services’ clinical system, TPP SystmOne, so that the admin team can see all the letters that need to be processed. Explains Nicola: “TalkingPoint opens a SystmOne letter and auto fills the patient data and 18 week wait number, so that the clinician can then just dictate in the body of the letter. TalkingPoint then automatically creates a SystmOne task – which is similar to an internal email – to tell the admin team that there is a letter on the system that needs to be processed. This whole process is as simple as a click of a button now, whereas without the TalkingPoint automation we would have to remember to physically log into SystmOne and create the task for the admin team. The automation makes this process instantaneous.”

Nicola continues: “The danger in the past, with analogue dictation, is that it was easy to misplace correspondence or process correspondence out of order, whereas with TalkingPoint it is easy to see whether your correspondence has been processed, so it is safer from a clinical perspective”.

Due to variable network speeds, the TalkingPoint Team developed an efficient roaming voice profile management solution for the service. Each clinician was provided with a data encrypted USB memory stick to store their voice profile, enabling each TalkingPoint user to simply plug their memory stick into their PC and use their voice file, ensuring excellent voice recognition accuracy whilst keeping network data transfer requirements to a minimum.

Malcolm Grant, Managing Director of the TalkingPoint Team commented “The encrypted memory stick solution is ideal for any service where network speeds may be variable or where users may need to be able to work on more than one network. “