Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is to introduce an AI note-taking tool in the emergency department at Leeds General Infirmary after a three-month pilot found it cut the time clinicians spent on documentation by 61 per cent. The Trust announced the results of the pilot, run with UK healthcare technology company TORTUS, on 27 October 2026.
The pilot ran from February to April 2026 in the ambulatory area of the emergency department at Leeds General Infirmary, under Dr Sundararaj Manou, lead clinician at the Trust’s adult emergency department. An evaluation found the technology saved clinicians 13 minutes per consultation, maintained high levels of accuracy on medication and allergy details, and recorded no serious safety incidents during the 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.
How the technology works
The ambient voice technology listens passively to consultations and drafts clinical notes automatically. Clinicians use secure devices and wireless microphones, and check the draft thoroughly by hand before the medical notes are finalised. The Trust said patient information is handled through encrypted UK-based cloud servers, and that consultation audio and transcriptions are stored only temporarily and deleted automatically after use.
According to the Trust, in June 2026 TORTUS became the first ambient voice technology to achieve Class IIa medical device status under the UKCA scheme, after an independent assessment by a UK Approved Body confirmed it meets recognised safety and performance standards.
Dr 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.”
From pilot to wider use
Following the pilot, the technology is planned for a phased introduction to the emergency department at Leeds General Infirmary in autumn 2026. The Trust will now concentrate on refining the workflow, training and adoption, and on extending use to a wider group of clinicians, including emergency nurses, and to more areas of the emergency department, including majors, minors and paediatrics.
Dr Manou spoke about the use of ambient voice technology in the emergency department at the Trust’s Research and Innovation Conference 2026, alongside a presentation from TORTUS on the wider partnership. Dr Dom Pimenta, chief executive and co-founder of TORTUS and a former NHS cardiologist, discussed the partnership 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.”
Dr Taj Hassan, Consultant in Emergency Medicine at Leeds Teaching Hospitals and Director of CENT-EC 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.”
Innovation Pop Up
The pilot complements the Trust’s Centre for Emergency Care and Global Health (CENT-EC Global), which launched in 2025 to bring together the development of AI tools, virtual learning environments and international partnerships for emergency care.
TORTUS is a member of the Trust’s Innovation Pop Up, which connects innovators and clinicians to evaluate new technologies in real-world settings. The project was 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 on the technology, and Dr Bev Riley of the Innovation Pop Up. Leeds Teaching Hospitals is also a member of the NHS Insites programme.
TORTUS was founded by NHS doctors and engineers in 2022. It uses speech recognition and AI to listen to patient consultations and generate structured clinical notes, referral letters and coding in real time.
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has a budget of more than £2.1 billion and 20,000 staff, and runs seven hospitals on five sites. It says it delivered close to 1.8 million episodes of care in its most recent year, including 359,000 attendances at its emergency departments.
More technology news from Leeds is in our tech section, including the University of Leeds’ second place in an AI readiness study.