With the NHS under immense pressure, bed stocks are infamously limited. However, this pressure shows no signs of slowing – and the number of beds across the NHS shows no sign of growing in a way that’s substantially impactful. What other approaches can we take to address this major challenge and, crucially, how can technology help?
From healthcare professionals to the general public, most of us are intimately familiar with the continued lack of beds in our healthcare system. Even pre-pandemic, few health experts felt we were well equipped with beds and ample resources. Now, the BMA continue to stress the severity of this problem: data from December 2022 reports occupancy rates consistently exceeding safe levels and call capacity a ‘critical limiting factor’ for the NHS.
Beyond those early adopter areas like radiology and pathology, speech recognition technology has the potential to reduce costs across entire Trusts – potentially freeing up resources to invest in new ways to grow capacity and bring occupancy down to reasonable levels.
The impact of DTOC on bed capacity
Recently, in our previous blog post, we wrote about the significant challenge of Delayed Transfers of Care (DTOCs) – those periods when a patient is ready to be discharged from an acute care bed but remains in the bed regardless. Typical bottlenecks and obstacles to discharge/transfer include:
- Awaiting completion of assessment, including incomplete documentation
- Awaiting care packages
- Awaiting nursing home placement
- Awaiting community equipment and adaptations
- Awaiting further non-acute NHS care
- Awaiting care packages in own home
- Disputes and legal challenges
Across all these areas, faster documentation and reporting time can help keep people moving along the patient journey. If not, DTOC dramatically worsens the problem of poor bed stocks and low capacity.
Every day a patient stays in an acute care bed unnecessarily, beds remain unavailable to those who need them. While this is obviously a barrier to delivering timely, effective treatment and care, it also creates unnecessary cost.
The costs of a widespread bed shortage
Bed shortages, driven by needlessly extended hospital stays and DTOCs, lead to significant costs to the NHS. This is a wasted expense that does nothing to improve patient journeys, experiences, and outcomes.
In February 2020, DTOC metrics reported by the GSS show on average 5370 people were delayed per day. The actual cost of these delays is significant by any measure. According to Age UK, in 2019, the cost of a DTOC bed per day was £346. whereas Department of Health figures from 2017 put the cost at £400 per day. Even if we assume the NHS’ own £350/day cost was accurate in February 2020, this means that month’s cost for 155,700 days was over a staggering £54 million.
An effective, accurate speech recognition technology like Augnito can reduce this cost and deliver a considerable saving by enabling clinicians and healthcare professionals to work and report more efficiently, removing some of the above mentioned common obstacles to prompt discharge or transfer. And the cost of adopting Augnito is significantly less than the cost of adding and maintaining more beds.
Repurposing even just 5% of February 2020’s estimated DTOC cost into Augnito licences could empower tens of thousands of clinicians to work more efficiently, reduce reporting time, and focus their energy on patients. Even a seemingly small 1% efficiency gain could dramatically improve both staff workloads and, more importantly, patient journeys overall.
Addressing the consistent fall in NHS beds
Over the past three decades, the total number of NHS hospital beds in England has more than halved. In part, this reflects changes to the ways patients are treated and is a trend we can see reflected in other advanced healthcare systems. For example, an increase in day surgery and long-term policies to move patients into care in the community have partly driven this ongoing reduction in capacity.
Of course, we all know that demand hasn’t followed this proposed downward trajectory. While the number of beds may have decreased, the number of patients treated has continued to rise sharply. Today, the UK has fewer acute beds relative to its population than most other European countries.
Worse, the longer-term outlook is bleak. The Health Foundation’s REAL Centre analysed bed stocks against best-case demand and found a significant gap. According to the report, 35% more beds will be required by 2030 – even if NHS initiatives to reduce hospital stay durations succeed. Apply the estimated DTOC rates we’ve shown above and the cost skyrockets.
The impact of speech recognition on efficiency and cost
As the NHS has consistently found for more than three decades, expanding bed stocks isn’t a simple task. Capacity is a complex issue and, as demand continues to surge, occupancy rates of 99% and above aren’t likely to improve without significant change.
It’s not that technology like Augnito AI powered speech recognition can solve the DTOC challenge overnight. It’s that incremental improvements to the way healthcare professionals work, collaborate, and share information creates consistent improvements over time. Eliminating the slow reporting and typing into cumbersome, often outdated systems saves time, reduces costs, and enables budgets to be repurposed into wider, systemic changes.
Augnito is already used widely across healthcare, helping those in diagnostic and reporting roles capture clinical data quickly, securely, accurately, and more cost-effectively. Crucially, Augnito’s flexible licensing means it’s available to Trusts for a fraction of the cost of adding capacity or keeping patients in beds for longer than they need them.
For Trusts, this creates time and money savings with a compound effect. The ease of implementing Augnito across multiple individuals, departments and parts of the patient journey means even small efficiency gains for healthcare professionals create a significant, meaningful saving overall. The facts speak for themselves: the cost of a single extra bed per day is close to if not 10 times more than the cost of a single Augnito licence for a month.
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[London, 10 February 2023] – As the NHS continues to address and reduce Delayed Transfer of Care (DTOC) incidents – and their associated costs – speech recognition has the potential to deliver transformative efficiency gains.
With the healthcare system under unprecedented pressure, NHS Trusts are reflecting on key metrics associated with performance, cost, and quality of patient care. Delayed Transfers of Care (DTOCs) see patients continue to occupy beds when they are clinically ready to be transferred or discharged. This results in significant expense to the NHS, a lack of available bed stocks, and disrupted journeys for both the patients waiting for transfer and those waiting for beds.
According to Scribetech, UK distributors of Augnito, a cloud-based, AI-powered speech recognition solution, new technology and workflow transformation have the potential to significantly improve how DTOC is managed.
“DTOCs are an indicator of how healthy the health and social care systems are,” stated Shiraz Austin, Managing Director at Scribetech (UK) Ltd and Co-Founder of Augnito.ai. “When patients continue to occupy beds they don’t clinically need, there’s a ripple effect that stretches across the patient journey. This includes delays to treatment for new patients, as well as a considerable amount of distress for those needlessly held in hospital.”
The scale of the DTOC problem is significant. In February 2020, reports show, there were an average of 5370 people delayed per day across the NHS in England – some attributable to the NHS, some attributable to social care, and some with joint responsibility. Based on the Department of Health’s reported costs of an excess bed per day (£350 – £400), the estimated cost of DTOC was as high as £2,148,000 per day for that month alone.
However, this immediate financial impact is just one consequence of DTOCs. With bed stocks at an all-time low and occupancy at an all-time high, DTOCs directly affect the availability of treatment, making acute care when a bed is finally available even more costly and negatively affecting patient outcomes.
Innovative new technology has the potential to positively influence these outcomes – but Austin remains realistic about the results.
Austin continued: “It’s not that technology like Augnito can solve the DTOC challenge overnight. It’s that incremental improvements to the way healthcare professionals work, collaborate, and share information eliminate the low-hanging fruit of slow reporting and typing into cumbersome, often outdated, systems. And time saved leads to reduced cost, where budgets can be repurposed into wider, systemic changes.”
Augnito was designed in partnership with healthcare professionals to address their biggest challenges. This includes bringing real-time SR to the clinical systems used as part of the discharge and transfer process, allowing people to work faster and more flexibly.
Adopted widely, Augnito can deliver:
– Faster reporting time and fewer internal delays to patient discharge or transfer
– Reduced costs, which can be repurposed into growing bed stocks and community nursing
– Increased bed availability with less waste and lower occupancy
– A way to offset the removal of the Government’s Covid-19 DTOC funding
As standard, Augnito empowers healthcare professionals with advanced SR on any device – desktops, web browsers, and mobiles. With a flexible SDK and API, Augnito can also be integrated into existing systems for accurate, immediate capture into an Electronic Patient Record.
Based on February 2020 DTOC data, just a small reduction in turnaround time, inaccuracies and errors could save the NHS hundreds of thousands per month. Austin concluded: “Augnito creates a more seamless way of working for healthcare professionals, helping with considerable workloads and backlogs. But its real impact is on the NHS as a whole, improving financial drainage and removing the bottlenecks that become obstacles to outstanding patient care and the best possible outcomes.”
END
Notes to editors
Read the full blog post here www.scribetech.co.uk/2023/01/31/can-the-advantages-of-clinical-voice-ai-sr-technology-help-reduce-dtoc
For further information, interview opportunities or accompanying graphics please contact: [email protected]
About Scribetech and the Augnito solution – visit https://www.scribetech.co.uk/ for details and follow us on Linked-In.
About Augnito India Private Limited – visit Augnito.ai.