How Sunnaas uses Vidd: “A sorting that is worth its weight in gold”

Vidd listens while the clinician talks with the patient. After the conversation, the solution produces a structured draft based on the note template for that profession and type of conversation.

The clinician reviews and quality-assures the draft before it is entered into the patient record. Where needed, the clinician can also ask questions of the transcript and be shown where in the conversation the information comes from. That makes the content easier to check.

The nursing assessment at Sunnaas covers twelve functional areas. A conversation nevertheless rarely follows the same order as the note template. The patient may touch on several topics along the way, and the information has to be placed where it belongs.

If the patient mentions bladder function while the conversation is about mental health, for example, Vidd places that information under the functional area of elimination.

Clinical nurse specialist Anne-Marthe Fjeldberg described this as a sorting that is “worth its weight in gold” when she demonstrated the solution for Sykepleien. In the feature, department head Geir Ove Karlsson said the sorting had so far not made any errors.

Fjeldberg also described a conversation with a patient with apraxia after a stroke, in which Vidd picked up what was said.

Conversations at Sunnaas vary between professions, and so do the notes. Vidd is therefore used with dedicated templates for different types of conversation, including nursing assessment on admission, the psychologist's assessment note, pre-consultation conversations for doctors and psychologists, outpatient assessment conversations and telephone notes.

The templates were developed in collaboration with the clinicians in the two departments, so that the drafts follow the structure and documentation needs of each profession.

When the clinician does not have to write as they go, more of their attention can stay with the patient. This recurs in the feedback from Sunnaas.

In user interviews, clinicians also say the work after longer conversations goes faster, particularly on admission. Several find that the notes capture information that might otherwise have been lost, and that the documentation is fuller than when they write it themselves.

Feedback from the pilot shows that clinicians want fuller notes and language closer to established clinical language, particularly in the assessment notes.

Vidd is therefore developing the templates further in close collaboration with the users at Sunnaas. The work includes fuller assessment notes, dedicated templates for nurses and doctors, and the ability to adjust the length and format of each section. The new template for nursing conversations is already in use.

Vidd was developed and tested with realistic, fictional patient conversations written by doctors, psychologists and nurses. Real patient conversations and sensitive personal data have not been used to train the solution.

Patient data is processed locally or in dedicated infrastructure under Norwegian jurisdiction, not in open or foreign cloud services.

For Sunnaas, the effect is not only about how many minutes may be saved, but also about whether clinicians get more time with their patients. The hospital is therefore measuring the documentation workday systematically.

Before the start, the hospital ran a baseline measurement of the clinicians' documentation workday. Among other things, it mapped how much time goes to documentation, how often the work is done outside working hours, and how documentation affects time with patients.

The measurement is repeated once more clinicians have taken Vidd into use. The results can then be compared with the starting point before the pilot.

The results are not in yet. We will update this page once the follow-up measurement has been carried out and the findings are ready.

Sunnaas is continuing its use of Vidd through the South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority's agreement on speech to draft, where Vidd is one of four suppliers. The Department of Follow-up after Brain Injury joins in the next phase.

A mobile solution is also planned, so that clinicians can record conversations without a PC.

Our warm thanks to Geir Ove Karlsson, Anne-Marthe Fjeldberg and Ray Murberg, and to all the clinicians at Sunnaas who have contributed time, experience and valuable feedback throughout the pilot.