Case Study: Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust achieves faster clinical letter turnaround and shared workload with BigHand

Guys and St Thomas’ NHS turns to BigHand for workload management

Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, a major UK teaching hospital with around 900,000 patient contacts a year, needed to reduce clinical correspondence turnaround times, replace tape-based dictation and improve workload sharing among secretarial teams to meet CQUIN targets for sending clinic letters within five working days. To address this, the Trust implemented BigHand Digital Dictation.

BigHand deployed its Digital Dictation platform across more than 1,700 users and 13 directorates, giving clinicians and secretaries an intuitive way to create, track, transcribe and share work and to integrate with external transcription services. The rollout delivered measurable gains: average clinical letters returned within five working days rose from 33% (2010/11) to 54% (2011/12), an Oncology pilot cut outsourcing spend by 40%, and the Trust reduced reliance on temporary staff while improving visibility, prioritisation and overall turnaround times thanks to BigHand.

Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust

James Spicer

Medical Oncology Consultant