In just six months, UHDB generated over 317,000 clinical letters, reduced service desk calls, cut IT overhead, and transformed documentation across 10 sites using T-Pro’s AI-powered solutions for modern clinical workflows.
UHDB has seen significant benefits from adopting the T-Pro platform across its Trusts. By implementing Digital Dictation, Speech Recognition, and Outsourced Transcription, the Trust has strengthened its digital maturity. These modules have helped streamline clinical documentation, reduce administrative workload, and improve efficiency across departments, contributing to faster turnaround times and enhanced patient care delivery.
As Debbie Loke, Executive Chief Digital Information Officer at UHDB, explained:
Background
University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust (UHDB) is one of the largest and busiest healthcare providers in the Midlands, delivering acute and community services to more than one million people. Spread across 5 hospitals and multiple satellite sites, the Trust manages hundreds of thousands of patient encounters every year. But as demand for clinical documentation surged, so did the complexity and fragmentation of the Trust’s systems. With 3 separate digital dictation systems in use—each with incompatible hardware, siloed workflows, and rising support demands—UHDB faced an urgent need for change.
Clinicians were burdened by inefficient tools that disrupted their daily routines. Service desk teams were logging 244 dictation-related incidents each month, consuming more than 10 hours of analyst time. Hardware costs continued to climb, supported by five virtual servers, two physical servers, and extensive licensing fees. Above all, users lacked a seamless, modern experience—one that could scale with growing patient volumes and align with national digital maturity goals.
UHDB’s vision was clear: standardise its documentation infrastructure, reduce technical overhead, improve turnaround times, and lay the groundwork for real-time speech recognition, without compromising clinician experience. The Trust needed more than a like-for-like replacement. It needed transformation.
Challenges
The core challenges UHDB set out to solve were systemic. Fragmented software tools led to inconsistent documentation and inefficient communication with GPs and patients. The complexity of maintaining three separate platforms placed a heavy burden on the Technical Services and Digital Services teams. Clinicians were working across disconnected systems, with no standardisation of templates, folder structures, or workflows.
Operationally, this complexity meant increased risk, resource waste, and frustration. The Trust recorded high volumes of incident reports tied directly to dictation tools, and clinicians frequently experienced delays that compromised both productivity and patient experience. On the infrastructure side, costly hardware investments, server upkeep, and manual version control across systems became increasingly unsustainable. With clinical demand accelerating and staffing pressures mounting, it was clear the Trust needed to unify and future-proof its approach to documentation.
Solution & Implementation
In March 2024, UHDB partnered with T-Pro to lead a full-scale documentation transformation across 10 sites. The objective was bold: decommission 3 legacy systems, introduce a Trust-wide voice recognition platform, move to the cloud, streamline hardware, and create a unified experience for over 2,700 users.
As part of this transformation, UHDB deployed three core solutions from T-Pro’s end-to-end platform: Digital Dictation, Speech Recognition, and Outsourced Transcription. These tools were selected to modernise clinical workflows, accelerate turnaround times, and ensure high levels of accuracy—while offering flexibility to meet varying clinician needs across departments.
T-Pro was selected for its scalability, clinician-first design, and seamless interoperability with existing infrastructure. Key integrations were established with Lorenzo and Meditech, enabling clinicians to search for patients, auto-populate episodes and templates, and electronically sign documentation that flowed directly into the electronic health record. Integration with Synertec and CITO supported electronic distribution and ensured alignment with the Trust’s document repository and folder structures.
Implementation followed a phased, agile approach. Royal Derby Hospital piloted the first deployment, with 250 users onboarded. Weekly expansion followed across Queen’s Hospital Burton, Florence Nightingale, Ilkeston, Samuel Johnson, Sir Robert Peel, and other community sites. UHDB and T-Pro co-led training and change management, with governance overseen by the T-Pro Oversight Group (TPROG). TPROG met fortnightly to address site-specific requirements, prioritise clinician feedback, and track optimisation requests in real-time.
In parallel, UHDB completed critical technical milestones: rationalisation of hardware, introduction of mobile dictation (replacing DVRs), and cloud migration. LDAP-based single sign-on enabled seamless, secure access across all sites. The entire deployment was completed by May 2025.
Benefits & Impact
By June 2025, UHDB had achieved measurable, trust-wide improvements in clinical documentation performance, operational efficiency, and user experience—marking one of the most impactful system transformations in recent NHS history. Following the deployment of the T-Pro platform, the Trust generated over 50,000 clinical letters in 2024. In just the first six months of 2025, that number surged to 317,282. Royal Derby Hospital alone produced 185,177 letters, followed by 87,851 from Queen’s Hospital Burton. Community hospitals such as Florence Nightingale and Sir Robert Peel also contributed tens of thousands of documents, highlighting widespread adoption across all levels of care and a dramatic acceleration in documentation throughput.
Clinicians Reported:
✔️ Significantly faster turnaround times, with the ability to complete, sign, and return documents remotely—streamlining workflows and freeing up more time for direct patient care.
✔️ Administrative teams gained real-time visibility into backlog volumes and document statuses, enabling smarter resource allocation and more balanced workloads.
✔️ Improved documentation quality, supported by standardised templates, integrated processes, and centralised control.
✔️ Real-time analytics provided departments with actionable insights into performance and throughput, helping reinforce compliance with national standards and internal benchmarks.
Unexpected benefits added even further value. Clinicians using the mobile dictation app were able to capture notes on the go—even in areas with limited connectivity—confident that the system would sync automatically once a network was available. This removed delays and allowed documentation to move seamlessly through the workflow. Secretaries gained instant visibility into dictations, enabling them to respond to GP and patient queries more efficiently, without manually searching through recordings. Clinicians without dedicated secretarial support benefited from a fully automated workflow, while reviewers could amend and return documentation to authors for e-signing with minimal friction.
Beyond immediate operational gains, the project has laid the groundwork for UHDB’s next phase of digital maturity. With speech recognition now embedded across the Trust, UHDB is poised to expand into ambient clinical noting and real-time transcription integration. Departments now operate with aligned templates, standardised document types, and consistent folder structures across CITO—enabling cross-site teams to share workloads, improve quality, and scale efficiently.
Future Vision
Looking ahead, UHDB is planning further optimisation through new integrations of T-Pro with Nerve Centre. These next steps will deepen real-time access to clinical insights and expand the platform’s impact across inpatient care. With ambient scribing on the horizon, clinicians will soon benefit from truly hands-free, context-aware documentation, further reducing administrative friction.
What began as a systems replacement evolved into a blueprint for enterprise-scale digital transformation. By replacing fragmented tools with a single, intelligent platform, UHDB has reimagined how clinical communication is delivered—securely, efficiently, and at scale.
About University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust
University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust (UHDB) is one of the UK’s largest and most complex NHS trusts, providing care to a population of more than one million people across Derbyshire, Staffordshire, and surrounding regions. The Trust employs over 12,000 staff, including more than 1,000 doctors and 3,500 nurses and midwives, and manages an extensive portfolio of acute and community services.
Each year, UHDB delivers over 200,000 outpatient appointments, more than 130,000 emergency attendances, and conducts over 60,000 elective and day case procedures. Its five hospitals—Royal Derby Hospital, Queen’s Hospital Burton, Sir Robert Peel Community Hospital, Samuel Johnson Community Hospital, and London Road Community Hospital—offer a comprehensive range of medical, surgical, diagnostic, and specialist services.
UHDB is a leading regional hub for clinical education and innovation, with close academic partnerships and active involvement in NHS digital transformation initiatives. The Trust is committed to clinical excellence, operational innovation, and improving outcomes for the diverse communities it serves.
Learn more at https://uhdb.nhs.uk
About T-Pro
T-Pro is a fully integrated, end-to-end clinical documentation platform designed to support healthcare providers at every stage of their digital transformation journey. From initial speech capture to fully integrated and scalable platform for modern healthcare, T-Pro delivers a unified ecosystem that replaces fragmented legacy tools with intelligent, scalable solutions.
With AI embedded at every level, the platform combines digital dictation, real-time speech recognition, ambient clinical scribing, electronic document distribution, outsourced transcription, and virtual consultations into a seamless user experience—tailored to the evolving needs of modern healthcare teams. T-Pro empowers clinicians to work more efficiently, reduce administrative workload, and maintain focus on delivering safe, timely, and patient-centred care.
To discover how T-Pro can support your digital transformation from start to finish, visit https://info.tpro.io or contact us at sales@tpro.io