Lyrebird & Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust

Organisation: University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust
Setting: One of the UK's largest and busiest acute Trusts
Deployment: 4-week pilot across outpatient specialties
Specialties: Women's health, paediatrics, haematology, respiratory
Focus: Addressing transcription backlogs and letter turnaround delays

‍The Challenge

Before deploying ambient voice technology, Alder Hey faced documentation and workflow challenges common across NHS acute settings:

1. ‍Letter turnaround delays: Outpatient letters could take up to 30 days to reach families and GPs, creating gaps in care continuity and communication.‍
2. After-hours documentation burden: Clinicians were spending evenings catching up on clinical documentation, contributing to unsustainable workloads.‍
3. Administrative pressure: Secretarial teams were stretched chasing letters and approvals through transcription and approval workflows.‍
4. Documentation during consultations: Clinicians divided attention between the patient and documentation requirements, affecting both the quality of interaction and the comprehensiveness of notes.

The Solution

Alder Hey partnered with Lyrebird Health to deploy AI-powered ambient voice technology across outpatient clinics, A&E, and specialist paediatric services. The technology captures clinical conversations in real-time and generates structured documentation, enabling clinicians to focus on the patient during consultations and review AI-generated notes afterward.

What changed on the ground

Families began receiving same-day correspondence: a visible and immediate change in patient experience. Clinicians could complete documentation review before leaving the clinic, rather than deferring typing to evenings or weekends. Administrative teams shifted focus from chasing documentation backlogs to patient communication and service coordination.

Clinical feedback during deployment

A clinical psychologist reflected:

"A complex appointment that would have taken me 40 minutes to type up now takes 5 minutes to check and copy. I could actually focus on the patient instead of worrying about the notes."

A consultant speech therapist added:

"Even in a multi-disciplinary clinic with eight professionals and a family talking, the system captured the key clinical content. It's game-changing."

Results

Productivity and Efficiency

1. ‍Time savings per consultation: 8 minutes saved per consultation on average across all specialties‍
2. Clinic capacity impact: 32 minutes saved per 4-hour clinic session, enabling 13.33% higher patient volumes with no additional clinicians or hours worked‍
3. Daily administrative time reclaimed: 26 minutes of admin time saved daily per clinician‍
4. A&E efficiency: 40% reduction in clinician time per patient in A&E settings‍
5. Resource reallocation: Reduced reliance on manual typing and outsourced transcription services, enabling resources to be redirected into frontline care

Documentation Quality and Safety

1. ‍Quality improvement: 7.2% improvement in clinical note and document quality using PDQI-9 (Professional Documentation Quality Index) standardised metrics‍
2. Comparative assessment: AI-generated notes scored 37.1/40 vs 34.6/40 for manually written clinical notes (6.2% higher quality)‍
3. Acceptance rate: 58% of AI-generated notes accepted verbatim by clinicians, demonstrating high baseline accuracy

Workflow Acceleration

1. ‍Letter turnaround: Same-day letters for all patients (reduced from up to 30 days)‍
2. Bottleneck removal: Elimination of approval and transcription bottlenecks that previously delayed documentation finalisation‍
3. Administrative workflow: Admin teams spend less time chasing documentation backlogs and more time engaging in patient communication and service coordination

Clinician and Patient Experience

1. ‍Clinician recommendation: 95% of clinicians would recommend Lyrebird to colleagues in other departments‍
2. Consultation quality: 100% of clinicians reported improved focus during consultations due to reduced documentation burden during patient interactions‍
3. Patient comfort: 93% of patients and families comfortable with AI-assisted documentation‍
4. Patient experience: 67% of patients and families reporting clinicians gave them more attention

Impact: What Implementation Achieved

The deployment at Alder Hey demonstrates that ambient voice technology can deliver meaningful improvements across multiple dimensions simultaneously:

• ‍For patients and families: Same-day correspondence improved care continuity and communication with GPs. Families reported clinicians were more attentive during consultations.‍
• For clinicians: Reclaimed evening and weekend time previously spent on documentation. Improved focus during consultations. Reduced cognitive load from managing documentation in real-time.‍
• For administrative teams: Shift from chasing transcription delays to patient-facing work and service improvement activities.‍
• For the organisation: Increased clinic capacity without additional workforce or extended hours. Improved documentation quality supporting clinical governance and audit readiness.

Leadership Perspective

Adam Bateman, Deputy CEO of Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust:

"Our partnership with Lyrebird represents an exciting step toward a future where technology empowers healthcare professionals to deliver even better care. Integrating AI into our operations can improve efficiency and patient outcomes, ensuring that every penny spent contributes to making a real difference."

Looking Forward

Alder Hey's deployment demonstrates that ambient voice technology can work at scale across diverse paediatric settings - from routine outpatient clinics to complex multi-disciplinary consultations and high-acuity A&E environments.

The results validate an implementation approach that prioritises clinical workflow integration, gradual scaling, and continuous quality monitoring. Sustained adoption at 500+ consultations per week at 6 months indicates that initial benefits are maintained as the tool becomes part of routine practice.

For other NHS trusts considering ambient voice technology, Alder Hey's experience offers evidence that the technology can deliver simultaneous improvements in productivity, quality, patient experience, and clinician wellbeing when implemented thoughtfully.

Contact Lyrebird Health:
enterprise@lyrebirdhealth.com | lyrebirdhealth.com

This case study is based on deployment data and feedback from Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust's 12-month ambient voice technology pilot (October 2024 - October 2025).