New technology is transforming delivery of care at Virgin Care sites

A new digital dictation and document creation system is transforming efficiency at Virgin Care sites across England, benefiting both patients and staff.

Virgin Care is working in partnership with Lexacom, one of the UK’s leading providers of digital dictation in primary care, to improve systems and processes at Lyme Regis Medical Centre and at the admin-based Florence Nightingale Child Development Centre in Essex.

The sites have now installed Lexacom digital dictation and speech recognition, which means clinicians and admin staff can now create and send crucial documents, such as referrals, quickly and efficiently.

The teams are already noticing direct benefits from the new system, including speedier referrals to specialists and improved accuracy of referrals due to full integration with clinical systems.

Clinicians have also found the mobile apps very useful when out on visits or visiting outreach clinics. It allows the dictation to be completed without needing to be attached to a machine, before being sent to the ‘cloud’ for administrators to download and type up when they’re ready.

Dan Socaciu, Patient Services Manager at Lyme Regis Medical Centre, said:

“I see absolutely no reason not to go for digital dictation. Since switching from tapes to Lexacom, processing documents has become much easier.

“One of the main benefits has been the ability to share workload. Our secretaries receive dictations as soon as they are recorded and can share out the work rather than working through multiple dictations on one tape. As a result, work is being processed more quickly, and patients benefit from faster referrals.

“Furthermore, the risk of dictations being misfiled has been completely eliminated as the software pulls in the correct patient data directly from our clinical system.” Dan added.

Digital dictation was introduced after Virgin Care’s Feel the Difference Fund – money the company invests each year in improving services through changes led or suggested by frontline teams – invested in the new system following an idea from a colleague in the business.

With Lexacom being one of the only digital dictation providers to offer secure, cloud-based dictation and transcription, as well as full integration with all UK clinical systems, the software was the natural choice to meet the needs.

Kirsty Thurlby, Head of Service Design for Virgin Care, said:

“Our investment in Lexacom digital dictation for these sites is another example of how our ‘Feel the Difference’ fund is helping improve working practices and enhance patient care. Our sites are already reporting positive results and we’re now looking at rolling out use of Lexacom digital dictation to other Virgin Care sites.”

Dr Andrew Whiteley, Managing Director of Lexacom, added: “Our software is specifically designed to help clinicians and administrative staff get more high quality work done in less time. We’re delighted to be working in partnership with Virgin Care to facilitate better ways of working using Lexacom digital dictation.”