Continuing our look at the role and responsibilities of Trust and hospital CEOs—and how speech recognition can help—we’re turning our attention to The Triple Aim: three key healthcare priorities that must be carefully balanced to ensure the best possible outcomes.
The past few years have seen the continued evolution and transformation of healthcare, not just in terms of new challenges, but also new models of care and systemic changes. The move away from CCGs to Integrated Care Systems and ICBs is strengthening the connectivity between organisations—but CEOs still face the challenge of bringing everyone together over shared goals and values.
The Triple Aim is one such set of goals: a renewed focus on the vital outcomes that successful healthcare systems deliver.
Understanding The Triple Aim and its expectations
Beyond the day-to-day health of a hospital or organisation, CEOs need a longer-term perspective that considers the bigger picture—beyond waiting times and routine metrics to larger, overarching outcomes.
Developed by The Institute for Healthcare Improvement, an independent body that strives to improve healthcare capability, The Triple Aim is an initiative that was first launched in 2007. In 2021, the UK Health and Care Bill directly referenced this initiative, highlighting a shared duty to ‘have regard to the wider effect of decisions.’
Specifically, The Triple Aim identifies three areas that CEOs and other stakeholders must consider in their decision making:
1. The health and wellbeing of people and populations, leading to the outcome of ‘better health’
2. The quality of services provided or arranged, leading to the outcome of ‘better care’
3. The efficient use of resources and budgets, leading to the outcome of ‘better value’.
Of course, these three areas are involved in a complex relationship. At times they align—better care should lead, in most cases, to better health. In other instances, they compete—the need for better care tends to make better value more difficult to achieve.
By design, Integrated Care Systems support this shared set of ambitions and development effective care, that reaches the entire community, at the best possible value, takes close collaboration between stakeholders. However, CEOs have an important role to play in setting the overall direction for their hospital, Trust or ICS—and the right strategy for innovation and technology can help significantly.
Technology, speech recognition and The Triple Aim
The shared priorities identified in The Triple Aim are designed to ripple through everything a CEO does and every decision taken. Outcomes, equality, efficiency and value are to be perpetual priorities, steering both micro and macro decisions as well as underpinning collaboration with other health and social care organisations.
This mindset also applies to technology. Any new platform or workflow needs to support these outcomes—while also delivering quality and value in its own right. In the words of membership organisation NHS Providers: “Digital technology can be a powerful hook and catalyst for change” but leaders must be “rigorous in ensuring the technologies they are adopting are making a positive difference.”
Speech recognition like Augnito promises to embed into organisations and deliver measurable value with a tangible impact on efficiency and care quality. When healthcare professionals can significantly reduce their admin and reporting time—without compromising on quality—organisations can move faster, respond with more precision, and remove a major barrier to positive outcomes and seamless journeys.
Augnito also integrates into existing technologies and EPR systems, adding the advantage of speech recognition into vital platforms for collaboration and quality assurance. While no technology is an all-encompassing answer to the challenges faced in healthcare, the potential for speech to support CEOs as they strive to deliver on The Triple Aim is huge.
Learn more about Augnito
See how Augnito Spectra aligns with The Triple Aim to improve care and patient journeys while controlling costs and maximising ROI Request a demo, or try Augnito Spectra and see the benefits for yourself.
With the ultimate responsibility for everything that happens across an NHS Trust, CEOs are under pressure to lead their organisations to success. Innovations in how healthcare is delivered—and how healthcare professionals are supported—are vital.
Day-to-day, CEOs need to navigate endless complexity and balance the often-competing demands of patients, employees, the wider NHS, and central government. Any efforts to digitalise and innovate will only deliver value if they affect the experience of all these groups—and enable CEOs to deliver a focused yet flexible strategy.
Continuing our look at how speech recognition supports various leaders across NHS Trusts, here’s how CEOs can overcome major pain points and challenges with a cloud-based, AI-driven solution like Augnito.
Empowering CEOs to address short, medium and long-term challenges
One of the most significant complexities facing NHS Trust CEOs is the inherent conflicts between short-term strategies and the long-term vision. As Trusts strive to address pressing issues like long waiting lists, overworked healthcare professionals, and demand that outstrips capacity, it becomes more difficult to consider the bigger picture and plan for the future.
This longer-term planning is key in alignment with wider NHS and government initiatives, including the ‘Triple Aim’. First outlined in the Health and Care Bill in 2021, this overarching ambition for the NHS and government is to create:
• Better health on an individual and population level
• Better care in terms of quality of services
• Better value and the sustainable, efficient use of resources
We’ll be covering the Triple Aim in more depth in a blog post in March but, for now, it’s clear that achieving these aims will be a process of continuous improvement—one that’s made harder if CEOs are busily addressing more overt, immediate challenges in workload and productivity.
Speech recognition can enable people to work faster, more flexibly and more accurately now—and puts Trusts on a path of innovation, data-driven decisions, and increased employee and patient satisfaction.
How can we innovate amid rising costs and financial pressure?
CEOs need to oversee the financial health of the hospital, but budgetary constraints often become barriers to innovation and digitalisation. Crucially, any new technology must deliver measurable value for healthcare professionals and patients. Speech recognition delivered in the cloud strikes a good balance between productivity-enhancing, available-anywhere technology and a simple recurring fee per user with no need for significant capital expenditure.
How can we improve patient and physician satisfaction?
CEOs understand the intrinsic links between the experience of patients and the experience of physicians. If physicians can report faster without sacrificing accuracy, they can keep up with their workloads, become more collaborative, and begin to address backlogs. In this way, accurate speech that saves hours each week directly influences the patient journey and outcomes.
How can we act strategically when demands and market pressures change fast?
One of the biggest challenges for hospital CEOs is the need to take a long-term view and plan strategically in a space that’s difficult to predict. Changing government and NHS priorities, intensifying regulatory compliance, and major healthcare incidents like COVID-19 can happen at a moment’s notice. Cloud-based speech recognition is a practical investment for Trusts because it is flexible by design, can be used in many ways—from desktops to mobile devices—and can be scaled up or down to match demand.
How can we evolve patient records into electronic patient records?
The changing nature of patient records and an increased emphasis on patient access have been priorities for the NHS for several years. CEOs have an important role to play in safeguarding the success of Electronic Patient Record (EPR) projects—not just giving the go-ahead for implementation, but actively supporting other leaders to drive adoption. Integrating speech at the outset of an EPR project is a powerful way to remove complexity and make adopting the EPR as easy as speaking. Designed for integration and interoperability, Augnito can become a central part of how people interact with your EPR—and increase the likelihood of a successful project.
Learn more about Augnito
See how Augnito Spectra delivers measurable benefits now while future-proofing the way you capture patient data. Request a demo and try Augnito Spectra to see the benefits for yourself.