The Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust’s Ambient Voice Technology (AVT) programme has been shortlisted in the prestigious HSJ Awards, recognising its innovative use of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance patient care, improve clinician experience and increase efficiency across outpatient services.
The programme has been supported by a rigorous evaluation conducted by the NIHR HealthTech Research Centre (HRC) in Sustainable Innovation and the University of Exeter, providing vital evidence on how AI can be safely and effectively implemented in routine NHS care.
The AVT programme uses speech-to-text AI technology to capture outpatient consultations and generate clinical notes and patient letters for clinician review and approval. Since September 2025, the technology has supported more than 40,000 outpatient appointments across the Trust.
The evaluation, led by the HRC and academic partners, explored how ambient AI technologies can improve patient experience, support staff wellbeing and reduce administrative burden, while maintaining safety and quality standards. The findings are helping to develop a practical blueprint for wider adoption of AI technologies across the NHS.
The programme has demonstrated significant efficiency gains, saving clinicians around five minutes during new patient appointments and approximately two minutes during follow-up consultations. These time savings are helping services recover valuable clinical and administrative capacity, supporting efforts to reduce waiting lists and improve access to care.
Importantly, clinicians report being able to focus more fully on conversations with patients rather than on documentation, helping to create a more patient-centred consultation experience.
Following its successful pilot and evaluation phase, the technology is now live across every doctor-led outpatient clinic at the Royal Devon, making it one of the most comprehensive deployments of ambient AI technology in the NHS.
