Sponsored by Olympus, BlackBerry, Grundig, Nuance, Philips and including exhibitors ScribeTECH, you will be able to learn about all the latest technologies available to the NHS, these include; digital dictation, speech recognition, outsourced transcription, BlackBerry’s mobile platform offering, the latest in dictation hardware devices and Nuance’s speech recognition solution. At the same time you can learn from other NHS Trusts who have been down this route already.

One of the key areas of the conference itself will highlight BigHand’s integration with Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking™ client-side and server-side speech recognition engines. With many NHS Trusts already identifying speech recognition as a key tool to implement within their strategies at present, the conference will explore and highlight the real benefits of integrating BigHand digital dictation technology with speech recognition software.

Conference sessions will include top 5 tips to implementing a solution, presented by Guys & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, discussions on bespoke integrations to suit your Trust as well as the opportunity for you to get your hands on the latest technology from BigHand.

James Kippenberger, Managing Director UK Healthcare at BigHand, comments:

“The BigHand Healthcare User Conference which is growing each year is one of the main events now within the UK healthcare market for these sorts of technologies. After listening to our customers, BigHand has continued to invest a significant amount of development into our product suite and we continue to do so.

This year’s event will focus on BigHand’s integration with Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking™ client-side and server-side speech recognition engines with added presentations from NHS Trusts using our solutions as well as sponsors Nuance, Olympus, Grundig and BlackBerry on their latest product offerings in the market. We hope to see you there…”

The User Conference is free to attend for both existing BigHand customers and any other Healthcare organisations wishing to look at how BigHand can help their Trusts to get more done.

BigHand’s now supports over 30 NHS Trusts with 15,000 users across the UK. We would like you to join us for what will be an interesting insight into the latest product offerings. NHS Trusts to have signed up to rollout BigHand in the past 12 months include:

-          Birmingham & Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust

-          Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

-          East Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust

-          Luton & Dunstable NHS Foundation Trust

-          Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

-          Robert Jones & Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic & District Hospital NHS Trust

-          Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust

-          Belfast Health & Social Care Trust

-          Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust

-          Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust

-          Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust

-          Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust

To register for the event please click here or email chris.bell@bighand.com or call 020 7940 5907.

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Contact:

Chris Bell, BigHand. Email: chris.bell@bighand.com Tel: +44 (0)20 7940 5907

About BigHand
BigHand is based out of London, Chicago and Sydney. BigHand is the leading provider of digital dictation and speech recognition technology to the UK Healthcare market. As a UK developer, BigHand has a 20+ strong development and products team based in the UK. BigHand is currently used by over 25 NHS Trusts in the UK, involving over 15,000 users. Further information is available at http://www.bighand.com

BigHand, the market leading voice productivity vendor in the global legal and professional services sector has today announced that W. Davies has reduced the average time taken for secretaries to transcribe dictations by 30%, as a result of deploying BigHand’s speech recognition module. The ability for secretaries to proofread attendance notes and appeal documents transcribed via Dragon NaturallySpeaking rather than typing from scratch has substantially reduced document turnaround times.

Trudi Fletcher, senior secretary for W. Davies, comments:

‘’High volume lengthy dictations such as attendance notes were monopolising much of our secretaries’ time, we therefore undertook a trial of speech recognition to understand how the software could remove much of this arduous typing, freeing time for secretaries to focus on more client facing work and increase productivity.

We found that by simply proofreading automatically transcribed text, secretaries were able to complete the work in two thirds of the time it would have taken previously– given some dictations are 45 minutes in length, the turnaround time is now significantly improved.

Dragon speech recognition has changed the way we approach document production and the expectations of our secretaries have also evolved. Support staff are now far more productive and have more time to learn new skills – with less time spent typing they are able to take on more of a PA or Executive Assistant role, enhancing the level of client service we deliver.’’

Andrew Hough, Speech Recognition Solutions Manager, BigHand, adds:

‘’As W. Davies has proven, the use of speech recognition particularly for lengthy dictations such as attendance notes has the potential to save a significant amount of time in document production. Automatically transcribed text can be proofread and any corrections made in far less time than it would take to transcribe from scratch, freeing secretaries to carry out other work. As more and more firms adopt speech recognition technology, we are seeing very impressive patterns of increased productivity emerging.’’

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It enables clinicians to create new recordings directly from their smartphones. Dictations are then automatically and securely sent using the push technology of the BlackBerry® solution to secretaries for transcription. The application also lets clinicians see the real-time status of each transcription and review final documents directly via their BlackBerry® smartphone.

Gunther Empl, ICT Program Manager at Birmingham and Solihull Mental NHS Foundation Trust commented;

“Managing dictation for such a mobile workforce presented several challenges. One was workload. Clinicians would sometimes wait until it was convenient for them to return to base and drop off a tape with their secretary; the secretaries ended up with one or two tapes and didn’t know how many dictations were on them.”

The BlackBerry® solution with BigHand digital dictation has improved workflow management. Turnaround times have improved because consultants no longer have to return to the office to hand over tapes. The deployment proved to be a success for the clinicians straight from the outset. At the end of the first phase, with just over one fifth of the 500 consultants using the solution, 67% of all dictations were already coming through the BlackBerry solution.

Gunther Empl, ICT Program Manager at Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust further commented;

“With BigHand digital dictation for BlackBerry® the backlog in one team has almost completely gone and correspondence is being sent out just a few days after recording, instead of a few weeks as sometimes happened in the past.”

BigHand’s healthcare digital dictation and speech recognition solution now supports over 30 NHS Trusts and over 15,000 users across the UK. To view the full case study, please click here.

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Contact:

Chris Bell, BigHand. Email: chris.bell@bighand.com Tel: +44 (0)20 7940 5907

About BigHand

Register now for the BigHand Healthcare User Conference 2011
BigHand is based out of London, Chicago and Sydney. BigHand is the leading provider of digital dictation and speech recognition technology to the UK Healthcare market. As a UK developer, BigHand has a 20+ strong development and products team based in the UK. BigHand is currently used by over 25 NHS Trusts in the UK, involving over 15,000 users. Further information is available at http://www.bighand.com

London, UK, 27 June, 2011 – Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, one of the world’s leading eye hospitals has today announced to invest in BigHand’s digital dictation solution for up to 250 users across the Trust.

Moorfields Eye Hospital plan to utilise BigHand’s digital dictation platform to initially replace the use of their analogue tape-based system, improve the management of workload across their departments, develop better provisions of cross over support for secretaries during leave or absence and to improve the efficiency at which documents can be turned around from clinician to the secretary and then onto the patient.  

Antoinette Flynn, Assistant General Manager Capacity, Access & Theatres SDU at Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust commented:

“We decided to implement digital dictation this year as a means to help further enhance the efficiency at which the Trust operates. We had to question if our current analogue tape system could deliver our Trust requirements in the long term. With the project still in it’s very early stages, we hope BigHand will be able to work with us in developing a much more seamless and streamlined way of working for our clinicians and secretaries.”    

Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust are now the fifth NHS Trust in London to implement BigHand’s voice productivity software.

Any Trust interested in a live demo, custom consultation or for further information about BigHand please visit www.bighand.com or email enquiry@bighand.com

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Contact:

Chris Bell, BigHand. Email: chris.bell@bighand.com Tel: +44 (0)20 7940 5907

About BigHand
BigHand is based out of London, Chicago and Sydney. BigHand is the leading provider of digital dictation and speech recognition technology to the UK Healthcare market. As a UK developer, BigHand has a 20+ strong development and products team based in the UK. BigHand is currently used by over 25 NHS Trusts in the UK, involving over 15,000 users. Further information is available at http://www.bighand.com

London, UK, 9^th June 2011 – BigHand, the global leader in voice productivity technology has today announced that Top-250 law firm Andrew Jackson has increased efficiency as a result of implementing BigHand’s Speech Recognition Module. BigHand digital dictation workflow technology integrated with the Dragon NaturallySpeaking server from Nuance Communications enables anytime, anywhere working, delivering high accuracy levels and improving document turnaround times. The firm’s Managing Partner Rob Penrose submits all his dictations via BigHand to speech recognition, freeing his secretary to focus on value adding activities.

Rob Penrose, Managing Partner at Andrew Jackson comments:

‘’We have found speech recognition to be a highly effective tool to achieve greater flexibility and efficiency. We first began using BigHand’s speech recognition module a year ago; we started with a group of fee earners across departments who were selected for their dictation style and as being receptive to new technology. The number of fee earners now using speech recognition has grown organically as they have seen its potential and have been asking for it.

I now send all my dictations to speech recognition, when in the office or working remotely, and in my opinion it works fantastically well. It enables me to produce documents wherever I am and at any time of day. Working remotely, automatically transcribed text is returned direct to my Notebook and I can press on with the work I need to do without any delay. We will shortly be rolling the technology out across our fleet of Android smartphones to improve mobile working for all.

Speech recognition has significantly decreased the volume of typing some secretaries are required to do, enabling them to spend more time on value adding activities to deliver first class customer service.

There is no downside to speech recognition; users have been very impressed with its accuracy and ease of use. It works brilliantly straight out the box, I have recommended it to several other firms looking to improve efficiency.’’

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The BigHand for Healthcare product is now one of the most advanced and integrated solutions in the NHS for digital dictation and speech recognition, incorporating clinical correspondence within the same application.

A spokesperson for the Noble’s Hospital, Isle of Man commented;

“Secretaries are now able to focus on urgent and priority documents; they now see how long dictations are which enables them to plan their workload effectively. Secretaries are now able to type letters before releasing hospital notes to other areas which means notes are up to date from a clinical point of view.  If one area is struggling with the volume of work I have been able to allocate resources from another area without a physical move, the secretaries feel the quality of the dictation is better.

From the medics point of view, the ability to monitor their workload, means they can put due dates on their dictations which ensures TCI dates etc are met, no more lost tapes and they are able to send urgent work and know it will be done as soon as they have finished dictating.” 

As a UK developer, BigHand has a 20+ strong development and products team based in the UK, made up of Software Engineers, all educated to Degree level, Software Testers who are ISEB qualified, a Technical Architect, Agile Business Analyst and Development Director. The BigHand for Healthcare digital dictation and speech recognition system is an integral part of a continual development programme within BigHand’s Healthcare division to deliver products and services that meet NHS Trusts’ needs and requirements.

Other NHS Trusts to have implemented the BigHand digital dictation and speech recognition system in the past 12 months include, Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust, East Sussex Hospital NHS Trust, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust.

Any Trust/Hospital interested in a live demo, custom consultation or for further information please visit www.bighand.com  or email enquiry@bighand.com

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Contact:

Chris Bell, BigHand. Email: chris.bell@bighand.com Tel: +44 (0)20 7940 5907

About BigHand
BigHand is based out of London, Chicago and Sydney. BigHand is the leading provider of digital dictation and speech recognition technology to the UK Healthcare market. BigHand is currently used by over 25 NHS Trusts in the UK, involving over 15,000 users. Further information is available at http://www.bighand.com

London, UK, 31 March, 2011 – BigHand the leading provider of digital dictation and speech recognition technology, has announced huge growth within the UK Healthcare market, with 13 NHS Trusts across the UK, electing BigHand as their preferred solution, following extensive tendering processes. Trusts include:

• Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust
• Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust
• East Sussex Hospital NHS Trust
• Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust
• Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
• The Robert Jones & Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic and District Hospital NHS Trust
• Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
• Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust
• Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust
• Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust

The BigHand for Healthcare product is now one of the most advanced and integrated solutions in the NHS for digital dictation and speech recognition, incorporating clinical correspondence within the same application. With this increased success BigHand, has expanded its Healthcare team by employing two new additional UK Healthcare Sales Managers, one new International Healthcare Sales Manager and another dedicated NHS Project Manager to ensure high quality and satisfaction levels are maintained as the demand increases for the BigHand for Healthcare system.

James Kippenberger, Managing Director UK Healthcare at BigHand commented;

“This is a really exciting time for the dictation market. The NHS is collectively realising huge benefits from implementing these sorts of solutions, but is equally pushing the boundaries of how the technology is used. The entire process is now better; not just for clinicians and secretaries internally, but for GPs and Patients as a direct result as well.

The success that BigHand has enjoyed over the last 12 months means that all those Trusts who now have BigHand, have a collective voice to determine the product’s development whilst also being able to share ideas between themselves about how to get the best from BigHand and its products.”

As a UK developer, BigHand has a 20+ strong development and products team based in the UK, made up of Software Engineers, all educated to Degree level, Software Testers who are ISEB qualified, a Technical Architect, Agile Business Analyst and Development Director. The BigHand for Healthcare system is an integral part of a continual development programme within BigHand’s Healthcare division to deliver products and services that meet NHS Trusts’ needs and requirements.

Any Trust interested in a live demo, custom consultation or for further information please visit www.bighand.com  or email enquiry@bighand.com

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Contact:

Chris Bell, BigHand. Email: chris.bell@bighand.com Tel: +44 (0)20 7940 5907

About BigHand
BigHand is based out of London, Chicago and Sydney. BigHand is the leading provider of digital dictation and speech recognition technology to the UK Healthcare market. BigHand is currently used by over 25 NHS Trusts in the UK, involving over 15,000 users. Further information is available at http://www.bighand.com

Incorporating 10 Authors and 3 Secretaries the BigHand for Healthcare digital dictation solution was deployed in order to focus on 3 key areas;

• Eliminate problems with analogue tape based systems breaking
• The ability to share work amongst the secretarial team
• To enable prioritisation of dictation of letters, eg urgent referrals.

With the implementation of BigHand, General Practitioner’s now have the ability to send all dictations, previously dictated on analogue tape machines, to a fully customisable workflow, in this case a ‘My Secretary’ default folder, which in turn will make the dictation available to all members of the Secretarial Team as well as an Ivy Court folder.  The Secretaries at Ivy Court work similar to a “pool” system, so the dictation is sent to one folder and the Secretaries “pick the letters off” for typing.  There is a “Confidential Folder” which is used for any confidential dictation, so that it cannot be read by all the users.

Debbie Brown, Medical Secretarial Team Leader at Ivy Court Surgery commented;

“The working practices of the Secretarial Team have completely changed with the implementation of BigHand.  Urgent dictations can now be typed as soon as it is dictated by the GP’s and any letter being collected by the patient can be marked with a due date.  The secretaries can then ensure that this is typed and signed ready for collection. 

The clarity of the dictation is superb and there is no need now for the doctors to take time to get their tapes to the secretaries or collect “clean” ones.  Every dictation can be viewed on the screen, so at any one time the secretaries know exactly what has been dictated.  When typing a letter, the dictation becomes locked, which means that another secretary cannot type the same letter at the same time!  When typed, the dictation can be marked as completed and this then moves to the completed folder so it is not viewed on the current dictation screen waiting for typing.

The improvement on the time taken to type urgent referrals has been of considerable benefit to the practice and the patients.  The secretaries do not need to constantly search through tapes for urgent dictation, thus saving time. In addition the workflow has improved considerably with the movement of dictation throughout the Practice, thus benefitting the GPs, Secretaries and patients.  The saving in constantly purchasing new tapes that have become damaged will certainly become evident shortly.  There is also a reporting package which will be of great assistance with any audit, secretarial performance etc. 

All in all, Ivy Court Surgery, the GPs, Secretaries and most importantly the patients, have all benefitted greatly from the implementation of BigHand.”

Other GP Practices to have implemented BigHand include; Cobham Day Surgery, Edinburgh University Health Service and Yaxley Group Practice.

BigHand are the leading provider of digital dictation and speech recognition technology to the healthcare market incorporating such NHS Trusts as; Birmingham & Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust and East Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust.

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Contact:

Chris Bell, BigHand. Email: chris.bell@bighand.com Tel: +44 (0)20 7940 5907

About BigHand:
BigHand is based out of London, Chicago and Sydney. BigHand is the leading provider of digital dictation and speech recognition technology to the UK Healthcare market. BigHand is currently used by over 30 NHS Trusts in the UK, involving over 15,000 users. Further information is available at http://www.bighand.com

London, UK, 9 March 2011 – BigHand, the leading voice productivity vendor in the legal and professional services community, has today announced that Dublin firm Eversheds O’Donnell Sweeney has increased out-of-hours productivity as a result of implementing BigHand’s server-based Speech Recognition module and iPhone app. Partners now use the mobile Speech Recognition functionality to produce lists, discovery schedules and attendance notes out-of-hours. Dictations recorded using BigHand for iPhone are submitted to the Dragon NaturallySpeaking™ speech server for transcription and the recognised text is then quickly returned back to the Partner’s iPhone.

Kevin Collins, Partner at Eversheds O’Donnell Sweeney comments:

‘’I have found the speech recognition software useful out of hours where longer documents have to be dictated and I believe the system learns well based on the corrections made. It has certainly improved my out of hours dictation experience as I can dictate longer documents and have accurately transcribed text returned to my iPhone.’’ 

Nicholas Eustace, IT Director, Eversheds O’Donnell Sweeney explains the firm’s adoption of Speech Recognition:

‘’We started using BigHand Speech Recognition back in March 2010 and were very impressed with how quickly the software learnt the Irish accent – one partner’s accuracy went from 23% to 95% after just one round of corrections. The aim of Speech Recognition is not to replace our secretaries but to provide a productivity tool for Partners to use out-of-hours. The ability to have automatically transcribed work returned to authors via their iPhone has proved very popular. We anticipate extending the use of Speech Recognition to trainees that have not been assigned a designated secretary to ensure they spend as little time as possible typing their own documents.’’

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BigHand, the leading voice productivity vendor in the global legal and professional services sector has today announced the release of the 4^th Edition of its award-winning digital dictation workflow software. Representing a major new version, BigHand 4 offers innovative new agile and powerful tools not available in any other single system including advanced multistep process management, sophisticated Speech Recognition pre-learning tool and mobility add-ons. The major new release also delivers convergence of popular user requested nFlow features within the BigHand platform. 

Jon Ardron, Chief Executive Officer, BigHand comments: 

‘’The release of BigHand 4 is a significant landmark in the development of voice productivity technology. Following the acquisition of nFlow in 2010, we promised our customers a major new version that would deliver enhanced efficiency and greater value. By taking the best of both BigHand and nFlow platforms, and combining those with a suite of innovative new features and tools such as Advanced Multistep Workflow, the release of BigHand 4 demonstrates our continued commitment to customer delivery and development of highly accessible voice productivity software. ‘’

BigHand 4 enables firms to:

• Control the entire document production process via Advanced Multistep Workflow

Easily create powerful and flexible multistep workflows to move dictations and associated documents through a series of desired actions and to multiple destinations, all within the same product without the need to buy additional business process management software.

• Maximise voice-to-text accuracy via unique Speech Recognition Pre-Learning Utility

Quickly and simply pre-train authors’ speech profiles using their existing dictations to ensure highly accurate results from the very first time of use. 

• Save time on the move via enhanced Mobile Email Integration

Use your smartphone to attach an email to a voice file, or insert an existing attachment, and forward to admin support for faster document turnaround.

• Increase smartphone productivity with BigHand for Android™  

In a world first BigHand now supports Android dictation on a variety of devices including the HTC Desire, Motorola Milestone™2 and Samsung Galaxy S. 

• Improve information management via new Autonomy iManage Integration

Off-the-shelf integration for authors to profile dictations either from within iManage or BigHand, without switching; references to docs stored in iManage can be attached to transcribed dictations.

• Minimise lawyer profiling via Practice Builder

Pre-build a list of clients and matters ready for authors to record against by importing data held in a third-party system such as a CMS; voice files are pre-profiled with key data.

• Increase draft quality via Bookmarking

Converged from the nFlow product, users can now bookmark points for reference within a voice file and add additional notes, improving the communication of critical info. 

• Reduce administrator input via Send Anywhere

Also converged from nFlow, authors can now dynamically choose the recipient of their voice file without the need for admin to create a new workflow.

• Improve security with Confidential Dictations

Authors can mark a dictation as confidential by simply checking a tick box, without the need to create confidential workflows and accessible only by the author and specified recipient. 

Asif Ali, Products Director, BigHand, comments:

‘’Version 4 represents a significant and exciting advance in the power of our technology. BigHand’s Advanced Workflow comprises a set of flexible and powerful tools within the core product which will help our customers to introduce further efficiencies, allowing them to define, control and report on their internal document production processes. And while BigHand 4 is feature rich, including further enhancements to our mobile applications line and a number of popular user requested features, we have maintained our commitment to producing highly usable and reliable software. In terms of power, flexibility and ease of use, BigHand 4 is unmatched.’’    

A video demo is available on the BigHand YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/bighandsoftware, plus a BigHand 4 Pre-Sales Technical Datasheet can be requested by emailing enquiry@bighand.com.

BigHand will also be demonstrating BigHand 4 at the Legal IT Show, taking place 1^st & 2^nd March at the Business Design Centre, London N1.