Radiology Archives

[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.

[London, 26 October 2022] – Augnito cloud-based voice-AI driven speech recognition technology helps accelerate healthcare digital transformation with new levels of accuracy, productivity and efficiency.

In the context of Government targets and plans for Digital Health and Social Care across the 2021 WGLL framework and 2022 Spending Review, Trusts are under increasing pressure to modernise the way they work. Augnito’s co-founder highlights the importance of cloud hosted, flexible and future-proofed solutions to make this transformation a reality.

”When modernisation is the focal point, Trusts replace one legacy platform with another, without necessarily addressing the real needs of users. As a result, they can’t unlock the true potential of a properly integrated system,” stated Shiraz Austin, Co-Founder of Augnito. He continued: “For example in radiology, the reason modernisation is taking place now is because the way radiologists and other medical departments work, have fundamentally changed. Existing backlogs prior to 2020, radiologist shortages, and clumsy technology made change inevitable. The pandemic and the surge in remote working have accelerated this change.”

For the promised NHS funding to achieve its digital transformation objectives and, specifically in diagnostics, the stated aims of increasing efficiency, making data sharing easier, and speeding up patient treatment, Augnito developers have identified 5 fundamental requirements for radiologists:

1. Faster transcription including extremely accurate dictation directly into clinical systems
2. Time-saving automation including ways to enter repeating report text without re-typing every time or cutting and
pasting from previously filed templates
3. Solutions that are available everywhere, not just inside healthcare settings but remotely and even on the move
4. Deep integration across all clinical systems for a seamless, holistic diagnostic and patient data workflow
5. Secure report sharing to deliver improvements across the clinical reporting path

Austin added: “Speech recognition is an effective way for radiologists to work faster and smarter – without compromising accuracy. Augnito delivers significant benefits out-of-the-box, and those benefits go beyond the radiology department.”

Augnito is a next-generation cloud-hosted voice-AI driven solution that can be securely accessed from any device including desktops, tablets, smartphones and browser-based applications. Augnito can also be integrated with a wide range of clinical systems and reporting technologies using its flexible API and SDK; delivering highly accurate transcription straight into the radiologists’ reporting platform, helping them save time and easily manage backlogs and workloads.

Radiologists, can also seamlessly and quickly share reports with other medical professionals and doctors involved in the patient’s care journey. For Trusts and healthcare providers, Augnito’s cloud-hosted approach makes implementing, provisioning, and managing this new technology simple and cost-effective.

Austin concludes that this ‘cloud availability’ is key to how Augnito will help transform radiology:
“More funding is great for radiology, but it does create pressure for Trusts to rethink how they work and embed new technology. Augnito gives them the best of both worlds – not just industry leading speech recognition with unparalleled accuracy, but a holistic solution that’s deployed with no costly changes to infrastructure or ongoing maintenance and updates.”

ENDS

Read the full blog post here www.scribetech.co.uk/2022/09/26/how-integrated-speech-drives-radiologists-performance/

For further information, interview opportunities or accompanying graphics please contact: [email protected]

Notes 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.

www.scribetech.co.uk/augnito-speechrecognition

Technology has a vital role to play as the radiology profession continues to recover from the impact of the pandemic, workforce shortages, backlogs and changing ways of working. The cloud will be key in maximising productivity gains as radiologists and NHS Trusts look for more efficient ways of working.

For years, it’s been clear that radiology is a department in need of change. Long before the pandemic, the profession was notoriously understaffed, creating a steadily growing studies backlog, year after year. Meanwhile, it was becoming increasingly clear that legacy imaging systems, with their on-premise, hard to access data, would soon become untenable.

The events of 2020 changed life, work and healthcare on a global scale. Suddenly, the idea of radiologists working remotely, and in some cases from home, became a reality. Trends that were already in motion accelerated – and the backlogs grew even further out of control.

The spark of much needed modernisation was lit – and acceleration to digital transformation became a reality.

Modernising diagnostics throughout the NHS

In November 2021, the UK Government announced significant funding to modernise and digitise diagnostics. This was in addition to a Spending Review promise of £2.3 billion to transform diagnostic services across England.

The stated goal of this funding was clear: to increase efficiency by saving staff time, making data sharing easier, and speeding up patient treatment as a result.

In radiology specifically, this funding was pledged to be focused on sharing scans across settings, improving how scans are requested, and enabling radiologists to report on scans remotely.

How can these diverse targets be met in a way that helps government funding and taxpayer money go further? What kind of new technology can become the bedrock of transformation for radiology? Furthermore, how can this technology become a seamless part of the workflow, not just for radiologists, but also in how medical departments and disciplines interact?

Removing old processes and obstacles is only part of the answer. Using a solution that offers portability, connectivity and flexibility towards how radiologists now need to work in the post pandemic digital era provides a more holistic approach.

Improving the core workflow of radiologists

A key barrier to radiologist productivity is unwieldy and out of date software that makes reporting on images more obtuse and time consuming than it needs to be. Replacing such with an AI-driven speech recognition (SR) and voice transcription system is a powerful way to make day-to-day reporting more efficient, by:

Enabling radiologists to easily dictate reports with extreme accurate results and little to no editing required
Delivering an intuitive, easy to use interface for transcription
Automating repetitive tasks through macros and auto-texts

As a simple replacement for manual transcription services, a voice-AI SR like Augnito creates considerable time savings for radiologists. As a result, they’re able to keep pace with a sizable workload – and reduce the backlogs created by the pandemic and working from home.

Taking speech recognition benefits everywhere

Crucially, Augnito was built in partnership with radiologists and around the clear, urgent need to make reporting more flexible, scalable and secure. The pandemic demonstrated that work from home was possible. But remote access is also a way for radiologists to work however and whenever they need to.

Augnito is a 100% cloud-hosted solution, available anywhere, bringing highly accurate speech recognition to smartphones, tablets and browser-based applications. With Augnito, radiologists can work securely from home – or anywhere else – while avoiding the need for complex and cumbersome locally installed applications, which often tie up IT resources.

At the same time, a cloud speech recognition solution helps Trusts use their funding effectively and achieve their digital transformation goals sooner and with greater ease. There’s no need for costly, complex changes to infrastructure, or ongoing maintenance and updates. A hosted solution is ready to use immediately, then backed by ongoing centralised management.

Speech recognition has helped radiologists work more efficiently for years. Now, cloud-hosted speech recognition empowers radiologists to work not just faster and more accurately, but with unlimited flexibility and peace of mind around security and compliance, including, GDPR and PID regulations. All while making change simple and risk-free for Trusts and healthcare providers, with a solution that can be securely provisioned in-line with a secure IT strategy.

Going beyond the radiology department

Radiologists themselves are at the core of how imaging and reporting is changing. But they also have an important role to play as part of a wider diagnostic process where information flows from GPs to radiologists and back again.

With this in mind, the connectivity and availability of radiology data is a fundamental requirement for digital transformation to be impactful – providing the holistic approach we touched on earlier.

Augnito can also be deeply integrated with other clinical and reporting technologies, using the Augnito API and SDK intergration tools.

Through integration, our industry leading SR engine can become an integral part of the entire healthcare clinical reporting path:

Enabling GPs to report directly into their patient admin system in primary care
Sending referral letters through to other specialised physicians/clinicians
Working hand-in-hand with EMR/EPRs
Returning patients and reports back to GPs and any follow-up community or mental health support

In many cases, we already have relationships with the leading providers to make Augnito integration faster and more straightforward. Similarly, we’ve built strong relationships across teleradiology, bolstering the ability to deliver SR to outsourced radiologists also helping to clear NHS backlogs.

In this way, Augnito isn’t just supporting radiologists individually – we are beginning to transform the entire field, as well as reaching out to the many other specialist professionals across healthcare.

A solution for every aspect of radiology reporting

Augnito is tailored to the challenges the profession is facing – and the big opportunities for change and improvement.

Accuracy is at the centre of what makes Augnito different. But it’s the quality of our solution and the sum of its many parts that makes it such a good fit for radiology’s continued transformation.

Augnito helps radiologists process their reporting more efficiently. It puts time savings in their hands, wherever they work – be it from hospitals or home. Augnito works out-of-the box with a range of intuitive apps and interfaces. It can also be deeply integrated with other clinical systems, extending the impact of its speech recognition benefits and empowering Trusts to save even more time and money. All from the same secure, cloud-based technology.

[London, 29 September 2022] Speech recognition has provided efficiency benefits to the health profession for decades, but can the integration of this vital tool into clinical systems and into radiology work processes further boost performance? Shiraz Austin, co-founder of Augnito, a voice-AI technology company, takes a deep dive into the integration benefits of clinical speech-enabled solutions.

Speech recognition as a mature technology has evolved over the years. Today it has the potential to redefine radiology, bringing new levels of accuracy, quality, speed and security. However, maximising these performance gains requires a measured approach to integrating voice-AI driven solutions and radiologists’ working processes.

Shiraz Austin, Co-Founder of Augnito notes, “The most impactful solution is one that’s deeply integrated, bringing the best possible speech recognition (SR) engine to existing PACS/RIS workflows. In the last two years, work processes have been required to be more flexible than ever, and to be delivered remotely, or, from wherever consultants find themselves. Add to this the unprecedented pressure that the pandemic created across the NHS – with resources strained beyond their limit – and it’s no surprise that health-tech solutions, including SR are needed, and they need to deliver more than user-efficiency gains. To have the greatest impact, they need to perform seamlessly, securely and accurately at a range of different locations.”

Selecting the right speech recognition solution to deliver a seamless experience on any device to allow radiologists to work without limitations, comes down to integration, which will also need to be efficient in itself.

Shiraz continues, “Considerations into hardware, connectivity, data security, user requirements system operating platforms, IT resource availability, costs and ultimately ROI across a site, help to draw up a solution needs check-list. In many cases a legacy product will be in place which no longer supports the growing needs of a Trust, thus a ‘usability vs. new deployment’ review is essential to analyse performance and savings that could be gained with switching solutions. With a clear improvements scope, integration of the right solution into an existing clinical system with minimum or no disruption and flexible reporting processes can boost the desired user benefits, reduce backlogs, support better workflows and save money.”

The latest in voice-AI driven speech recognition, Augnito, offers a cloud-hosted product that’s already supported on multiple devices, and integration to clinical systems via its API and SDK. As a result, radiologists can benefit from integrated speech recognition and clinical word processing within their reporting tools, securely and accurately, wherever they need to without disruption.

Augnito is transforming speech recognition to meet the evolving needs of clinicians, by understanding the challenges of today, and offering a flexible solution and ROI to support the future of healthcare.