Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has partnered with UK-based healthcare technology company TORTUS, to introduce ambient voice technology in one of its emergency departments.
An evaluation of the pilot found the technology cut documentation time by 61 per cent, saving clinicians 13 minutes per consultation, while maintaining high levels of accuracy on medication and allergy details and recording no serious safety incidents throughout the three-month pilot.
Clinicians said they felt less mentally drained by admin tasks and were better able to focus on the patient in front of them, rather than the screen.
The pilot took place in the ambulatory area of the emergency department at Leeds General Infirmary under Dr Sundararaj Manou, who is lead clinician at the Trust’s adult emergency department.
The technology passively listens to consultations and automatically drafts clinical notes, with clinicians using secure devices and wireless microphones, before a thorough manual check is done by clinicians to finalise medical notes. Patient information is handled securely through encrypted UK-based cloud servers, with consultation audio and transcriptions stored only temporarily and automatically deleted after use.
The trial period took place between February and April this year and in June, TORTUS became the first ambient voice technology to achieve Class IIa medical device status under the UKCA scheme, after passing independent assessment by a UK Approved Body to confirm it meets recognised safety and performance standards.
Following this successful pilot, the ambient voice technology is now planned for a phased introduction to the emergency department at Leeds General Infirmary this Autumn.
Dr Sundararaj Manou, Consultant in Emergency Medicine at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “We are one of the busiest acute trusts in the country and we know that AI has the potential to support busy emergency departments by reducing the administrative tasks on clinicians. We wanted to work with a partner which could help to capture and structure information during patient consultations, which helps to free up valuable time for healthcare professionals to focus on what matters most – assessing, treating and caring for patients.”
Dr Manou spoke at the Trust’s Research and Innovation Conference 2026 about the use of ambient voice technology in the emergency department, alongside a presentation from TORTUS on the wider partnership.
TORTUS CEO, co-founder and former NHS cardiologist Dr Dom Pimenta discussed the partnership at the conference in a session entitled “From AI Vendor to AI Partner”.
Dr Pimenta said: “TORTUS has now seen over four million NHS patients and is the leading AVT provider in the UK. We have always worked closely with our systems, and now we are evolving that into a longer-term partnership model. Our work with Leeds Teaching Hospitals represents this shift from traditional vendor relationships to genuine partnership – moving to focus on solving problems for trusts, not just supplying the technology. By working closely with clinical teams across multiple areas at Leeds, we’re able to develop AI solutions that address real-world challenges and deliver measurable improvements in patient care. This collaborative approach is essential for ensuring that technology truly serves the needs of NHS hospitals and their patients. It’s been a real pleasure to work across multiple areas at Leeds as we scale this way of working with our trusts.”
The Trust will now focus on refining the workflow, training and adoption and scaling to a wider clinician group including emergency nurses and more areas of the ED, including majors, minors and paediatrics.
The pilot compliments the Trust’s Centre for Emergency Care and Global Health (CENT-EC Global), which launched last year to bring together the development of cutting-edge AI tools, virtual learning environments and international partnerships to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing emergency care.
Dr Taj Hassan, Consultant in Emergency Medicine at Leeds Teaching Hospitals and Director of CENTEC Global said, “ We are absolutely delighted with the initial results but we know that embedding technology into daily practices can be a huge challenge. We look forward to supporting this innovative service evaluation through its next stages”.
TORTUS is a member of the Trust’s Innovation Pop Up which connects innovators and clinicians to support the evaluation of new technologies in real world settings to help their adoption into clinical services.
This project has been facilitated by the Innovation Pop Up’s business development team and the Emergency Department Research Team, including Dr Angad Sethi ( ED IT Lead), Dr Mohit Arora (lead for training of AVT) and Dr Bev Riley from the Trust’s Innovation Pop Up. It compliments Leeds Teaching Hospitals’ membership of the NHS Insites programme which helps to drive innovation for the future NHS.
TORTUS was founded by NHS doctors and engineers in 2022 and uses advanced speech recognition and AI to listen to patient consultations and generate structured clinical notes, referral letters and coding in real time.