Article from The Parliamentary Review: https://www.theparliamentaryreview.co.uk/organisations/lexacom

Lexacom is a leading UK technology company that specialises in document creation and management. As part of its services, its software suite incorporates digital dictation, speech recognition and transcription. The platform is used across many different sectors including healthcare, law and justice, education and in government. Managing Director Dr Andrew Whiteley tells The Parliamentary Review about Lexacom’s background and how it strives to encourage collaboration, innovation and efficient working.

Facts about Lexacom:

Lexacom is a culmination of my experience as a doctor and my passion for information technology. While working as a GP in a South Warwickshire practice, I noticed the various faults of the dictation and administrative systems we used. With the equipment often breaking and being very expensive to repair, I knew a better system could be developed. I wrote a computer program to eliminate these flaws and began to use this system in my own practice. A couple of years later, my business partner and I founded the company to provide this solution to others. As awareness of the benefits spread, our reputation grew and we began to sell widely. All the inefficiencies of the old system, including delays in transcription to lost tapes and dictations, were eliminated. With increased accuracy and efficiency of the doctor’s dictations, there was an improvement in medical notes, referral times and patient care.

 

 

Encouraging collaboration

It became clear to me that although our software was achieving my original aims, there was so much more that was needed and that, with further development, the software could deliver. At the time, our aim was to make the NHS more efficient while protecting patient safety and ensuring the highest level of data security. Our specialist expertise allowed us to produce a stand-alone product of the highest quality, but we also wanted to ensure that we could integrate with other NHS software.

After a great deal of work and building trust between organisations, we are now the only company that is approved and recommended by all of the NHS clinical systems in primary care. Our significant growth over the last five years has meant we are the dominant player in primary care. We initially sold our software to individual GP practices; we now sell directly to clinical commissioning groups covering tens to hundreds of individual GP practices. Lexacom is used by over 50 per cent of all GPs, a statistic reflected by the 7.5 million dictations which are used for hospital referrals and clinic notes each year, over half of the 14 million total.

 

As NHS structures change again to reflect modern healthcare, we are looking forward to working with primary care networks to further enable them to deliver the high-quality service they work so hard to achieve. Embracing innovation and driving efficiency As a medium-sized company, with our own in-house software development team, we have always strived for total flexibility of the software to enable bespoke solutions for our customers. This ensures that the software easily integrates into any existing business processes. We work closely with our customers to make sure the software fulfils all their criteria. Early on, it was clear that there was a requirement for centralised typing pools for different individual GP practices. We were the first company to develop a secure cloud-based system which allows the sharing of resources and workload. This is of great benefit to those smaller practices who cannot afford to

employ their own transcriptionists and is also helpful in the management of holiday and sick leave. There are many examples of the efficiencies that have been achieved, including one CCG with over 150 practices sharing work between them.With the advent of reliable speech recognition, we have now integrated this into the software so that it can be used by a doctor dictating directly into the document or where the speech file is processed by the speech recognition engine and the document sent on to the transcriptionist for review.

We are the only solution offering this all from one product. To respond to the large growth in community healthcare, we have used our cloud-based technology to release the Lexacom mobile app. This has also attracted interest from the secondary care market as hospitals realise they can link up with GPs by using the same platform.

 

“Lexacom is used by over 50% of all GPs”

“With the software and platform being continually updated, it has also become applicable to a wide range of sectors beyond healthcare”

Trust in the ability to ensure the safety of patient or client data is paramount, and to this end, we employ a medical specialist as our clinical safety officer. They work directly with NHS England and NHS Digital to ensure we exceed their patient safety standards. With the software and platform being continually updated, it has also become applicable to a wide range of sectors beyond healthcare. The expansion into the legal market and the wider business world has propelled our growth further.

Adapting to our growth

As a leader in the sector, we have been able to recruit the best in their field to help develop and grow the company. We have specialist sales teams for healthcare and legal markets, and we continue to expand into other businesses such as accountancy, engineering, conveyancing and education. Our rapid expansion and shift from selling to individual GP practices to CCGs with hundreds of practices has presented us with new challenges.

By expanding our sales and technical engineer teams, we have been able to rapidly deploy the software. In its latest version, our software can be downloaded and installed directly from our website and used securely anywhere, on any device, allowing even more flexibility for the user. Our state of the art software has enabled us to be one of the few companies in a crowded marketplace who can demonstrate double-figure growth year on year. I am, however, even more excited about the next five years with the release of new software which will continue to consolidate our position in the healthcare market and develop our growth in other markets. We already have great strategic relationships with other international companies that will further our national and international expansion. I believe that we can realistically achieve 75 per cent market share of primary care. With increased use of cloud technology and artificial intelligence, which is in line with NHS Digital Strategy, we are confident we can continue to move forward, streamlining and improving the way the healthcare system operates.

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