A 12-month deployment across outpatient clinics, A&E, and specialist paediatric services — from routine appointments to complex multi-disciplinary consultations.
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Before deploying ambient voice technology, Alder Hey faced documentation and workflow challenges common across NHS acute settings. Outpatient letters could take up to 30 days to reach families and GPs, creating gaps in care continuity and communication.
Clinicians were spending evenings catching up on clinical documentation, contributing to unsustainable workloads. Secretarial teams were stretched chasing letters and approvals through transcription and approval workflows.
During consultations, clinicians divided their attention between the patient and documentation requirements — affecting both the quality of interaction and the comprehensiveness of notes.
The impact was felt across every layer of the service: patients, clinicians, administrative teams, and the organisation's ability to govern its own records.
Alder Hey partnered with Lyrebird Health to deploy 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 notes afterward.
Sustained adoption reached 500+ consultations per week at 6 months — indicating that initial benefits were maintained as the tool became part of routine practice.
32 minutes saved per 4-hour clinic session enabled 13.33% higher patient volumes with no additional clinicians or hours worked. Resources previously spent on manual typing and outsourced transcription were redirected into frontline care.
Lyrebird-generated notes scored 37.1 out of 40 versus 34.6 for manually written clinical notes — a 6.2% quality improvement validated against the PDQI-9 framework. 58% of AI-generated notes were accepted verbatim by clinicians, demonstrating high baseline accuracy.
Families began receiving same-day correspondence — a visible and immediate change in patient experience. 67% of patients and families reported that clinicians gave them more attention. 93% were comfortable with AI-assisted documentation.
Administrative teams, no longer chasing documentation backlogs, shifted focus to patient communication and service coordination.
Alder Hey's deployment demonstrates that ambient voice technology can work across diverse paediatric settings — from routine outpatient clinics to complex multi-disciplinary consultations and high-acuity A&E environments.
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 simultaneous improvements in productivity, quality, patient experience, and clinician wellbeing are achievable when implementation is done thoughtfully.
