Preventing clinician burnout: could Ambient Voice Technology (AVT) be key?

Clinician burnout and workload is a national emergency which is impacting on patient safety. Technology may make an important contribution to helping to mitigate some of the workload-related challenges faced by clinicians, with Ambient Voice Technology (AVT) potentially playing a key role in reducing administrative burden.

AVT is a general term for products which combine speech recognition and supervised artificial intelligence (AI) to work in the background and change how clinicians interact with electronic systems, reducing some of the time taken for manual documentation. More than 1.75m patient appointments take place each day across the NHS, and AVT may help to speed up tasks such as note taking or ordering of basic tests at scale - if it is implemented effectively.

The pace of progress in this field is high. In autumn 2023, the Health Innovation Network (HIN) South London brought together industry partners, clinicians and patients for an Innovation Exchange event to understand the "art of the possible" and articulate the hopes and challenges around AVT.

This report details key outputs from the Innovation Exchange event, including:

• Possible use cases for AVT products within the next 6 months;
• Reactions to current AVT products;
• Perspectives on how to spread and scale AVT;
• Risks of AVT and potential mitigations;
• Future development of AVT for more sophisticated use cases.