Tortus AI: Revolutionising Patient Care in the NHS
Have you ever wondered how Artificial Intelligence could change the way doctors and nurses look after us?
Meet Tortus, the new AI technology being trialed in the London NHS to make healthcare faster and more efficient!
What is Tortus?
Tortus is a cutting-edge AI assistant designed to help healthcare workers do their jobs better by using something called ambient voice technology. Here’s how it works:
- Listening and Transcribing: Tortus listens to the conversations between doctors and patients and turns those discussions into written text.
- Information Extraction: It figures out the important medical details you chatted about with your doctor.
- Noise Filtering: Tortus can even block out any unnecessary background noise or other irrelevant conversations, so nothing important is missed!
- Documentation Generation: Finally, it uses all that information to make a clear clinical report for your doctor, without them having to type everything out during your appointment.
Trial Details
This cool tech is being trialed by Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH) and is given a boost by NHS Frontline Digitisation. They want to test Tortus during 5,000 patient check-ups in different places like GP offices, emergency rooms, and mental health services. The big idea is to save doctors from getting bogged down by paperwork so they can spend more time chatting with and looking after patients.
Benefits of Tortus
The perks of using Tortus are quite impressive:
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Improved Patient Interaction: With Tortus doing the note-taking, doctors can focus on you without distractions. As Maaike Kusters, a paediatric immunology consultant at GOSH, puts it, “I can sit closer to them face-to-face and focus on what they were sharing with me without compromising on the quality of documentation.”
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Enhanced Documentation Accuracy: It ensures that everything discussed is recorded accurately. No important detail is left behind.
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Increased Efficiency: By taking care of the admin tasks, Tortus gives doctors extra time and energy to help more patients.
Robustness and Safety
To make sure Tortus is up to the task, rigorous testing has been conducted. Actors with different accents pretended to be patients, and even when they talked about things unrelated to health, Tortus was able to pick out the medical parts correctly.
Safeguards like making sure Tortus never tries to guess diagnosis or treatment keep things safe. This system knows that doctors are the ones best able to make those important medical decisions. Hafsa Ahmedi, Tortus product manager, reassures that the AI has “so many safeguards to not interpret what is being said.”
And, you don’t need to stress about your privacy because all data used by Tortus is deleted as soon as the document is made.
Future Implications
If the trial is successful, we might see Tortus helping doctors and nurses all over the UK! This could lead to:
- Wider Adoption: The NHS might use Tortus in more hospitals and clinics.
- Digital Transformation: A big step towards making healthcare in the UK more technologically advanced and efficient.
As Martin Machray from NHS England highlights, “Ambient voice technology is a great example of how AI could be used to support clinicians and improve patient care.”
Conclusion
The trial of Tortus AI is an exciting time for the NHS, as it looks for ways to make patient care better and faster. By cutting down on time spent on admin chores and making sure medical info is accurately captured, Tortus allows doctors to concentrate on what truly matters – their patients. The results of this trial will be instrumental in shaping the future of AI technology in hospitals and clinics, and we are keen to see where this journey takes us.