The Challenge  

Health and care teams are under sustained pressure, with significant clinical time spent creating and completing documentation. The ability of clinical teams to act and record what happens in some situations, such as resuscitation, is variable – leaving clinical situations open to scrutiny. At the same time, organisations need to introduce fast-moving AI technologies in a way that is safe, secure, inclusive and supported by evidence.  

The Solution

Artificially intelligent (AI) clinical scribes, aka AVT, use advanced speech recognition and generative AI to understand the spoken word and build a structured document – such as notes, summaries and letters – that capture what happens in a clinical situation. The approach offers transparency and situational awareness for record keeping. 

AVT is used regularly in primary care but hasn’t yet been brought to tertiary acute care settings. When it is appropriately governed and embedded into clinical workflows, AVT has the potential to reduce administrative burden, improve the quality and timeliness of documentation, improve clinician wellbeing, and help them to focus more fully on the person in front of them.  

Our work in partnership  

Health Innovation South West is working with NHS England South West and health and care partners to build a trusted regional hub for AVT adoption to support healthcare delivery.  

We are bringing together clinical, operational, digital, safety, information governance, commercial and patient perspectives so organisations can learn from one another. 

Our product-agnostic support helps partners to:  

• understand the evolving AVT landscape and identify priority use cases 

• assess organisational readiness and plan a proportionate approach to adoption 

• navigate clinical safety, information governance, regulation, procurement and local assurance 

• design implementation, change, training and evaluation around real clinical workflows 

• capture evidence, share practical learning and develop approaches that can scale 

Unlocking AVT in neonatal care

This year, we are working with NHS England South West, Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, and an AVT provider on a nationally significant project exploring the use of AVT in neonatal care.  

We are aiming to capture practical learning from implementation to develop a reusable, product-agnostic blueprint to share with other NHS organisations, enabling them to understand the governance, workflow, training, evaluation and change requirements involved in adopting AVT in complex clinical environments, while retaining freedom to select a product that meets their local needs.

Our impact to date

In 2025-26, we: 

• Built relationships with major AVT providers 

• Supported over 10 partner organisations via our AVT knowledge hub 

• Advised or assured 5-7 regional pilot or implementation sites  

• Trained or supported over 500 system staff 

• Evaluated AVT (Anathem) implementation in Livewell  

• Reduced documentation time by 20-25% (GOSH benchmark) 

• Increased patient-facing time by 20-25% (GOSH benchmark) 

To help inform our early-stage work, in early 2026 we delivered a workshop Unlocking AVT for Scalable NHS Change, that brought together clinicians, NHS partners and suppliers to explore the implementation of ambient voice technology in clinical settings. 

Learn more

Are you planning, piloting, or scaling AVT in the South West? Do you have implementation learning to share, or would you like support to identify your next steps? We would like to hear from you. Contact us.

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