Hospices to trial AI voice technology in bid to reduce clinical paperwork

East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust is leading a scheme to give hospices across England a free six-month trial of ambient voice technology, in an attempt to cut the amount of time clinical staff spend writing up notes during end-of-life care. The software, called CLEARnotes, listens to consultations between patients and clinicians and generates medical documentation automatically, without staff needing to type or dictate separately.

The mechanics of the rollout are straightforward. Hospices that sign up, whether they run inpatient wards or community-based services, can claim up to 30 licenses for the duration of the trial. Implementation and staff training are fully funded, meaning participating hospices face no upfront cost to get the system running. The arrangement only becomes a paid one after the six months are up, and even then only if the hospice can point to measurable gains in efficiency. No improvement, no charge. It is a model designed to let hospices test the technology without committing a budget they may not have to spare.

The reasoning behind the scheme is rooted in what end-of-life care actually demands of its staff. Tony McDonald, chief information officer at East Lancashire, has described the rationale in terms of where clinicians' attention ought to be directed. Hospice work depends on empathy and presence, on a nurse or doctor being fully there with a patient and their family during conversations that are often the hardest a person will have. Every minute spent on a keyboard during or after that conversation is a minute not spent listening. By automating the administrative side, the trial aims to give staff back that attention, rather than splitting it between the patient in front of them and the screen beside them.

This is not an untested idea. CLEARnotes has already shown results elsewhere in the NHS. In East Lancashire's own pre-operative assessment department, the software contributed to a 14 per cent rise in productivity. At The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, a pre-operative clinic using the same technology recorded a 25 per cent productivity increase. Those figures give the hospice trial something firmer to stand on than good intentions; they suggest the time saved on documentation translates into a genuine increase in clinical capacity, not just a marginal tidying-up of paperwork.

The hospice scheme also sits within a much broader shift taking place across the health service. Trusts up and down the country are showing increasing interest in generative AI and ambient voice capture, not only for clinical notes but for drafting letters and summarising meetings, tasks that have traditionally eaten into the hours clinicians might otherwise spend with patients. University Hospitals Birmingham is currently looking for an ambient voice technology system worth around £500,000, one that would need to integrate directly with its electronic patient records. Meanwhile, the University Hospitals of Leicester and Northamptonshire has gone further still, awarding a £1.9 million contract to the supplier Accurx to deploy similar software across several of its hospital sites.

Taken together, these moves point to a health service that is no longer treating AI transcription as a novelty confined to a handful of pilot wards. The sums involved, several hundred thousand pounds in Birmingham, nearly two million in Leicester and Northamptonshire, indicate that trusts are willing to commit serious money to technology they believe will free up clinical time at scale. The hospice trial led by East Lancashire is smaller in scope and more cautious in its financial terms, but it reflects the same underlying logic. If the software can do for end-of-life care what it has already done in pre-operative clinics, the saved time will not simply vanish into efficiency statistics. It will be redirected toward the patients and families who need it most, at the point in their lives when that attention matters more than almost anything else.