[London, 29 November 2022] – Integrated into CIMAR’s cloud PACS solution in less than six months, Augnito helps clinical users create reports as much as 40-60% faster while working from anywhere.
Creating, accessing and sharing accurate medical information is the core of every radiologist’s workflow. As a result, the NHS, medical groups, imaging centres, and researchers are investing in sophisticated cloud technology to drive digital transformation, streamline image management, and improve clinician workflows.
CIMAR UK is a cloud-native Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS), dedicated to making medical imaging and results securely accessible anywhere. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the CIMAR team saw a significant increase in demand for remote reporting, driven by lockdown requirements and an increase in remote working and working from home (WFM).
This accelerated the no longer desirable, but now essential, need for digital transformation and, ultimately, created an opportunity for CIMAR to maximise efficiency and flexibility for radiologists through speech-enabled diagnostic image reporting. Now, with the addition of Augnito’s AI-powered speech recognition, CIMAR can do even more to help radiologists work faster without compromising accuracy.
Dennis Wait, Chief Commercial Officer at CIMAR UK stated “There is little point having the flexibility of the cloud accessible remotely, without all the functionality that clinicians are used to having in the hospital. In our search for a cloud-based speech recognition solution provider to partner and integrate with, the ability to easily ‘talk’ to our cloud-based technologies was a critical element. We liked Augnito because it is cloud-native, as we are, it already used open API technology, and we appreciated its people-centred design approach. This aligns with our philosophy of finding a solution to a problem or challenge.”
“In terms of price, we found Augnito highly competitive and way beyond anything we had encountered in our SR solution search. We really wanted to pass that value on to our customers.” Continued Wait.
The Augnito integration with CIMAR’s cloud native PACS was completed in less than six months, with the first client using Augnito as part of the CIMAR solution soon after.
“Augnito’s team responsiveness, the solution’s API integration compatibility with our systems, coupled with its ease of use, simplicity, and ability to ‘unpack and go’ drove much of our decision-making process.” Added Wait.
Augnito is a cloud-hosted, AI-driven solution that can be accessed wherever needed. It also offers a comprehensive SDK and flexible API. This enables healthcare technology providers like CIMAR to bring highly accurate medical speech recognition, into existing clinical workflows and/or system platforms.
CIMAR also identified Augnito’s centrally updated language models as key to its success. These hosted models are designed to cover the vocabulary and terminology of multiple medical specialities, from radiology to cardiology. Users can switch between these models as necessary, ensuring complete coverage for every department and every kind of report.
“The agility and beautiful simplicity of having cloud-based SR available via any device and with a ‘portable’ profile allows a user the possibility to be anywhere in the world and still have access to a full suite of functionality. We’re still in the process of discovering how extensive Augnito can be, but it’s already an integral part of our solution offering to customers.” Concluded Wait.
For Augnito, this partnership represents a continued commitment to enabling radiologists to work more flexibly, 40-60% faster and highly accurately while coping with surmounting workloads and the backlog of existing reporting.
“CIMAR is a best-of-breed cloud PACS and Imaging Technology Innovation of the Year, 2022 Radiology Award Winner. We’re delighted that Augnito can play a role in helping CIMAR enable radiology departments to transform. Time-saving is an important advantage of using speech recognition (SR), but SR integrations also mean we can further expand that time-saving, by simplifying the working lives of clinicians, giving them a single system, available anywhere, that helps them accurately complete reports quickly and keep the patient journey moving.” Stated Shiraz Austin, Co-Founder of Augnito.
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Note to editors
About Augnito
Augnito is a secure, cloud-based, AI-driven clinical speech recognition product suite. It offers fast, easy ways to capture live clinical data on any device with 99% accuracy, support for multiple medical specialities, and no need for voice profile training. Augnito brings seamless speech recognition to daily workflows and third-party clinical systems, turning medical information into clinical documentation and making healthcare intelligence securely accessible everywhere. Augnito was developed by its parent company, Scribetech, a clinical voice solutions innovator, fusing 20 years of transcription and digital dictation services to the NHS, speech-to-text, and clinical coding solutions for the healthcare sector, and its own speech recognition engine with advanced voice AI technology. Visit www.scribetech.co.uk/augnito-speechrecognition for more details.
About CIMAR
At Cimar we understand the challenges faced when it comes to managing today’s medical image data, demand for its access, and cross enterprise integration needs. Cimar’s services are true-cloud (Cloud-native) and arm you with award winning functionality designed to make it faster and simpler to store and share medical images securely, anywhere. We understand the limitless possibilities of the cloud and will help you reimagine your medical image management strategy to ensure its fit for your organisation and its future, safely and securely.
… how speech recognition can enhance pathology and the wider patient journey
Pathology as a critical department on the path to diagnosis and treatment, has a vital role to play in simplifying and improving the patient journey – but with structured reporting, restrictive workflows, and legacy technology, unlocking mobility, efficiency and accuracy is a significant challenge.
Patient journeys across healthcare are, in some ways, unavoidably complex. Successful diagnosis and treatment require numerous departments to work together, sharing information and data, often under significant pressure and time constraints. Restrictive technology makes this task needlessly difficult for departments like pathology and, more importantly, it negatively impacts the patient experience and, ultimately, outcomes.
Like radiology, pathology must evolve to meet rising demand, considerable backlogs, and waiting lists that remain at record levels. Flexible, accurate speech recognition has the potential to deliver this evolution.
The challenges for pathology
The health of patients depends on a healthy, high-performing healthcare system. However, like radiology and many other departments, pathologists face considerable challenges in coping with the number of samples and analyses required to address NHS backlogs. These challenges are the main contributing factor to stress, burnout and poor work-life balance, more so than quantity of workload alone.
In August 2022, the number of people on NHS waiting lists reached 7 million. This landmark figure, in the height of summer, paints the picture of a difficult winter. For departments like pathology, it’s an issue that is perpetual.
In part, these difficulties are the product of high demand from patients and little to no transformation in how pathologists record and report on their work. Many departments are tied to deeply embedded, often antiquated workflows. With a need for structured reporting and a lot of complex detail, changing these workflows is seen as a significant risk.
At the same time, the pressure to change is immense. In 2015, the National Advisory Group on Health Information Technology in England found that pathology was key to diagnostic support outcomes and should be at the forefront of NHS digitisation. Since then, funding for AI and digital pathology services has been forthcoming and the NHS has begun to introduce new information standards for pathologist reporting.
However, transforming pathology and improving the patient journey also means rethinking how pathologists work day-to-day.
Investing in core clinical workflows and pathology efficiency
Unlike radiology, pathology is not traditionally an early adopter of new technology. Many pathologists find themselves using outdated, legacy systems every day as part of their routine. It’s in these ever-present, often limiting systems that Trusts can achieve the biggest return on investment.
Technology like voice-AI powered speech recognition allowing all too needed handsfree dictation now help to accelerate the pathology reporting workflow directly into the LIMS, enhancing and making them significantly easier for pathologists. Standalone or integrated into an EPR, EMR or LIMS, intuitive and contextual speech recognition gives pathologists a more efficient way to work, creating measurable time savings and improved reporting speed.
Ultimately, this influences the patient journey, waiting lists, and outcomes. Speech recognition enables a faster, more agile department, delivering a quick return on investment that empowers the radiologists and pathologists, to support the Trusts and patients alike.
At the same time, closer integration across pathology and radiology is a necessity. A study published in BMC Medicine identified this opportunity to bring diagnostic reporting systems together, improving clinical efficiency, research, innovation and, ultimately, patient care.
How Augnito is transforming pathology and patient care
Pathology is chronically underfunded and dependant on legacy technology, often unseen in depths of a hospital campus. Across complex workflows from macroscopic and microscopic analyses to final diagnosis, pathologists need best-in-class, hands-free technology to stay on top of rising workloads and play their important role in the patient journey.
Cloud-hosted
Augnito is a cloud-hosted, AI-powered speech recognition solution, that can now enable pathologists to create those structured reports using their voice to describe the biological make up and structure in precise detail. This provides seamless follow-on specialities with an easy, fast way to decipher the diagnostic next steps. Crucially, it’s the innovative and disruptive technology solution built in partnership with healthcare professionals, accounting for the reporting language specifics and complexity of every department across the patient journey.
Accuracy
Augnito delivers beyond 99% accuracy on any device, in any accent, with no need for voice profile training or a long onboarding process. The solution also includes a specific histopathology language modelling, capable of handling the complex detail and unique terms of pathology.
Mobility
It fits effortlessly into pathology workflows, any new technology especially when it needs to be completely mobile. Augnito is available on any device, anytime, anywhere, wherever and whenever it is needed.
Integration
Augnito includes a flexible API & SDK, “Augnito Voice Services”. This can be used to integrate the best-in-class medical speech recognition with the LIMS, enabling pathologists to work better, more accurately, more efficiently, and crucially within the existing workflow structure.
Flexibility
Finally, a cloud-hosted speech recognition like Augnito is available quickly with no complex changes to infrastructure. Departments can start using Augnito on any scale, especially where budgets are strained. By delivering measurable improvements to pathology workflows in days, not months, Augnito delivers a fast return on investment and soon pays for itself many times over.
Challenge Augnito – try it. Partner with Augnito
Try the Augnito App or request an evaluation version. Challenge it with the longest most complex medical terminology in a noisy environment and let us know what you think! Talk to us about reselling Augnito, or about its easy integration capabilities. Talk to the growing UK list of Augnito Partners to find out how their customers successfully transferred from legacy SR products to benefiting from this next-gen voice-AI driven speech recognition solution.