Dr John Jeans, NHS doctor and national lead for the National CLEAR Programme (Credit: 33n)
Five NHS trusts are being offered fully funded support to assess the safety and performance of ambient voice technology (AVT) through a new pilot launched by the National CLEAR Programme.
The six-month initiative, called CLEARvalidate, aims to help NHS organisations generate evidence on how AI-powered clinical documentation tools perform in real-world settings, supporting the safe adoption of the technology across the health service.
AVT, often referred to as AI scribes, is increasingly being rolled out across the NHS to automate clinical documentation, reducing administrative workload and allowing clinicians to spend more time with patients.
However, unlike conventional software, AI-generated documentation produces different outputs each time it is used, meaning performance can vary between clinicians, specialties, environments and patient groups.
The National CLEAR Programme said this creates a growing need for continuous assurance and evidence-based governance to ensure the technology is being used safely and effectively.
Dr John Jeans, NHS doctor and national lead for the National CLEAR Programme, said: “AVT has the potential to transform clinical practice, but its long-term success will depend on how well we measure, understand and assure its performance.
“CLEARvalidate moves the conversation beyond adoption, providing the evidence needed to support safe, transparent and sustainable use of ambient voice technology across the NHS.”
Through the pilot, five NHS trusts will deploy CLEARvalidate across up to three clinical specialties, receiving fully funded implementation, onboarding, platform access and expert support to develop an evaluation framework tailored to local priorities and governance arrangements.
Rather than acting as a reporting tool, CLEARvalidate is designed as a continuous safety assurance framework, enabling organisations to monitor the performance of their AVT, identify potential risks and highlight areas for improvement.
The platform assesses factors including audio quality, transcription accuracy, preservation of clinical meaning and documentation quality, providing trusts with information on how the tools perform in practice.
The programme is also expected to generate evidence for clinical safety and governance, support wider adoption, identify training requirements and demonstrate whether AVT delivers measurable benefits for clinicians, patients and NHS organisations.
Trusts participating in the pilot will be able to use the findings to develop evidence-based business cases for longer-term investment if the technology demonstrates measurable benefits.
The National CLEAR Programme hopes the pilot will generate national learning to inform future adoption of AVT and demonstrate how assurance frameworks can support the safe and scalable adoption of AI across the NHS.
Expressions of interest are open until 5pm on 21 August 2026, with successful trusts set to evaluate AVT across multiple specialties while contributing to a growing evidence base for AI assurance in healthcare.
The validation pilot follows the launch of the National CLEAR Programme earlier this year, when East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust was announced as the host organisation for the national rollout of CLEARnotes, an AVT platform.
The trust is inviting NHS acute, community and mental health trusts to submit expressions of interest for a six-month deployment of CLEARnotes, which is designed to reduce documentation burden and improve clinician-patient interaction.