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BigHand voice software replaces analogue tapes in push to facilitate a faster more reliable service for patients

London, UK, 4 January, 2010 – BigHand, a leading provider of voice technology for the NHS, has today announced a 50% improvement in turnaround times of documents at independent hospital, Cobham Day Surgery. Turnaround times have now been reduced to approximately 3-4 days whereas previously this could be anything up to 7-10 days. Incorporating over 30 consultants and 5 secretaries across 2 sites, BigHand technology has enabled consultants to record important notes and instantly submit them to a pool of secretaries across either site for immediate transcription.

As the number of patients supported by Cobham Day Surgery began to grow significantly, so did secretarial and administrative workloads. Not in a position to add to the existing secretarial team, and coupled with the implications of the ‘patient pathway’ aiming to make sure correspondence is turned around quickly, meant Cobham Day Surgery began to consider other ways of working. The eradication of analogue tapes, which would often end up broken, lost (especially working cross-site) and the sound quality of tapes deteriorating, has allowed BigHand technology to effectively eliminate the detrimental effect of analogue tapes slowing down the document turnaround process. Secretaries are now able to monitor their own workloads on a daily basis and effectively manage each individual dictation instantly as it comes in; ensuring work is turnaround in the fastest time possible.

Michelle Campbell, Administration Manager at Cobham Day Surgery commented;

“One of the big improvements by switching to digital dictation was the quality of dictation. We have a varied group of Consultants with different accents and even those that speak clearly can often seem muffled on the analogue tapes.

We also hoped to achieve a faster, more reliable service and so far we feel we are well on our way to achieving that. In addition Cobham Day Surgery are working towards becoming a paperless unit and hopefully in time we will be able to work without notes completely, so having BigHand digital dictation technology compliments our own future plans.”

NHS organisations that have already rolled out BigHand technology include Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Yaxley Group Practice, The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust, Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, Edinburgh University Health Service and Wrightington Wigan & Leigh NHS Trust.

-ENDS-

Contact:
Chris Bell, BigHand. Email: chris.bell@bighand.com Tel: +44 (0)20 7940 5907

About BigHand
BigHand is based out of Chicago, London, Sydney and Toronto. BigHand is the leading digital dictation vendor in the global professional and public services sector and BigHand Mobile (BlackBerry Edition) was voted ‘Mobile Product of the Year’ at the CNET Business Technology Awards 2008. BigHand is used by nearly 1,000 professional services and public sector organisations worldwide. Further information is available at http://www.bighand.com/digitaldictation/Healthcare.html