The Finnish digital dictation specialist Diktamen has expanded into the UK healthcare market with the launch of a clinical documentation platform.
This new product is designed to reduce NHS administrative pressures and streamline patient workflows.
Originally founded in Finland in 2007, the company first entered the UK market in 2017 through the legal sector before shifting its focus towards healthcare over the past two years.
Speaking to Building Better Healthcare, John Evans, Business Developer at Diktamen UK, said the company had spent more than 16 months completing the accreditations required to work within NHS environments.
“We had to go through a huge amount of accreditation work before we could even begin serious NHS conversations,” Evans explained. “Now we’re finally at the point where we’re able to move forward with trusts, procurement frameworks and AI deployments.”
While the company’s UK healthcare push has centred around securing NHS accreditations and medical device compliance, the business also recently joined the NHS SBS Digital Dictation and Speech Recognition framework.
Evans said the company is also currently pursuing inclusion on emerging NHS AI procurement frameworks.
There's a new framework that has come out for AI, which we're currently going through a process to get on that as well.
“I think one of the curve balls was that unless you're accredited as a medical device, you can't go on these frameworks, and you can't do anything, so it sort of stumped us a little bit last year,” said Evans.
Why launch in the UK?
Despite the accreditation hurdles that the company has experienced while expanding into the UK healthcare market, Evans said that the move was a natural one.
The dictation software was already equipped with two languages for providers to use: Finnish and English, making it easily transitionable for NHS use.
“Like all Nordic companies, once they're successful in that particular region, they've got ambitions of the UK and the NHS… so it was quite a neat fit for both sides,” said Evans.
Integrating AI into the already existing offering
Alongside expanding operations into the UK, the company has recently launched its healthcare AI offering: Diktamen Medical Professional.
The AI offering combines digital dictation, speech recognition, workflow management and ambient voice technology into a single platform.
The system is designed to capture conversations between clinicians and patients during consultations, automatically generating clinical notes, outpatient letters and follow-up actions without requiring clinicians to manually type information during appointments.
“The ambient voice capture is a discrete listening tool that picks up all clinical information in the medical consultation, extracts it and produces a letter at the end of the consultation,” said Evans.
According to Evans, the technology is intended to help clinicians spend more time focusing on patients rather than on administrative tasks.
“The doctor can turn away from the computer and actually focus on the patient while the platform captures the clinically relevant information in the background,” he said.
Diktamen’s platform also incorporates ICD-10 and ICD-11 clinical coding capabilities, allowing AI-generated documentation to automatically identify coding requirements linked to hospital reimbursement processes.
Evans said this functionality could help trusts reduce delays associated with manual clinical coding and administrative processing.
In addition to ambient voice capture, the company is also developing what it describes as an “agentic framework”, enabling the platform to automatically identify and assign follow-up actions generated during consultations.
For example, if a clinician requests blood tests, patient information or referrals during an appointment, the system can automatically extract those tasks and send them to relevant administrative teams.
The company is working towards integration with major NHS electronic health record systems.
This would include EMIS, with full integration expected later this year.
While ambient AI technologies are becoming increasingly prominent across healthcare, Evans said adoption within the NHS remained cautious due to procurement complexity, workforce training requirements and concerns around compliance.
“There’s still a major education piece around ambient AI and what these systems can actually do,” he said.
The technology is moving rapidly, but adoption is always the challenge.
Next steps for the UK expansion?
Diktamen believes smaller healthcare technology providers can offer a more agile alternative to larger established suppliers, particularly as integrated care boards increasingly look to procure digital solutions at scale.
Alongside NHS expansion, the company is also continuing to target private healthcare organisations, with several UK private hospitals already using its core systems and additional trials currently underway across the UK and Ireland.
The business is also exploring future opportunities within pharmaceutical, legal and emergency services sectors as adoption of healthcare AI technologies continues to grow.
Evans said the company’s immediate focus is now centred on securing its first NHS go-live deployment, a tightly managed transition from testing environments to a live production state.
“We’re at the stage where everything is geared towards implementation,” he said.
The technology is there, now it’s about getting organisations comfortable enough to adopt it.