Tim Hiles, Chief Operating Officer, Leeds Teaching Hospitals

Every minute matters in a busy emergency department. When clinicians spend less time completing notes, they may have more opportunity to focus on patients and other clinical tasks. At Leeds General Infirmary, a three-month trial of ambient voice technology in the ambulatory care area reportedly saved 13 minutes per consultation and reduced documentation time by 61 per cent, with no serious safety incidents reported. The next question is whether those results can be sustained as the technology reaches more staff and clinical settings.

For Leeds Teaching Hospitals, this is not simply a question of introducing new software. The technology must work within existing clinical routines, staffing arrangements and patient-care requirements. As Chief Operating Officer, Tim Hiles has a wider responsibility for operational delivery across the Trust. His role provides an organisational perspective on the conditions needed to implement changes of this kind, although the clinical pilot itself was led by Dr Sundararaj Manou alongside the emergency department, research and innovation teams.

Expanding a successful trial brings additional considerations. Staff need appropriate training, new processes must fit established workflows, and clinicians must be confident that the technology supports rather than complicates their work. Leeds has outlined a phased expansion involving emergency nurses and different areas of emergency care, including majors, minors and paediatrics. The results from the initial trial provide a starting point, but broader implementation will need to demonstrate that the benefits continue in different clinical environments.

Hiles’s professional background gives useful context to the organisational challenge. He began his career in patient services as a Complaints Officer at a large London trust, later managing the complaints service and helping establish one of the country’s early Patient Advice and Liaison Service teams. His experience across patient-facing services is relevant to the questions that accompany digital change: how patients are informed, how concerns are handled and how confidence in care is maintained.

Trust Board minutes from March 2024 recorded regular meetings between the Complaints and Chief Operating Officer teams to maintain links with patient feedback. For ambient AI, such considerations extend beyond the speed of producing clinical notes. Patients may want to understand when the technology is being used, how their information is handled and what safeguards protect their privacy. Clear communication and accessible routes for raising concerns will therefore matter alongside technical performance.

Hiles has also held roles closer to frontline operations. He joined Leeds in 2013 as General Manager for Urgent Care, subsequently managed Abdominal Medicine and Surgery, and became Director of Operations for the Leeds Vaccination Centre. In that position, he led delivery of the COVID-19 vaccination programme. He later served as Deputy Chief Operating Officer before taking up his current role.

The vaccination programme offers a relevant example of large-scale healthcare delivery, where coordination between teams and dependable processes were essential. Ambient AI is a different intervention, but its wider adoption also requires staff, systems and day-to-day operations to work together. A promising result in one clinical setting will not, by itself, establish that the same benefits can be achieved throughout a hospital.

Patient access is another important consideration. At a Trust Board meeting in March 2024, Hiles discussed waiting-list recovery plans and national expectations for reducing long waits. Faster documentation could potentially help clinicians use their time differently, but it would be premature to equate minutes saved with shorter queues. The effect will depend on how the released time is used, whether it improves assessments or handovers, and whether any gains can be measured consistently.

This makes evaluation central to the next stage. The Trust will need to consider clinical safety, staff feedback, training, information governance and the practical effects on patient care as implementation grows. Evidence from the wider rollout should establish whether the technology reduces administrative pressure without creating new difficulties elsewhere in the clinical process.

For NHS organisations, the Leeds experience illustrates the difference between demonstrating that a digital tool can perform well in a pilot and showing that it delivers lasting value in routine care. Technology providers must account for the realities of hospital work, while health-service leaders need evidence that adoption supports clinical teams and patients.

The Leeds trial has produced encouraging early results, but its impact across a wider emergency department remains to be established. Manou and the clinical teams are leading the evaluation of the technology, while Hiles’s broader operational remit is relevant to the environment in which any expansion will take place. Whether the time saved ultimately improves patient experience will depend on the evidence gathered and how effectively the Trust incorporates the technology into its everyday services.