Automation in primary care: how technology is helping the workforce

The growing elective backlog and day-to-day pressures are overwhelming administrative workers, leading to low staff morale and high turnovers. This blog discusses how automation is alleviating some of these pressures by handling low-risk tasks, allowing administrators to focus on more complex duties, and ultimately enhancing both staff and patient satisfaction.

The health and social care workforce remains under enormous pressure, with the long-term challenge of reducing the elective backlog alongside busy day-to-day operations placing strain on almost every part of the system.

Inevitably, these pressures have taken their toll on many staff. The rate of nurses leaving the profession has spiked since the pandemic, and up to a third of UK-based doctors report that they would consider going abroad to practice in the near future.

In primary care, the impact of these challenges on administrative staff is often overlooked. Administrative staff make up more than half of the primary care workforce; without their work organising appointments, registering new patients and acting as the link between clinical staff and the public, the NHS’s “front door” would quickly slam shut.

The same issues affecting other staff groups also apply to administrators, practice managers and reception staff working in primary care – and the resulting low morale and high staff turnover rates pose a real risk to the operations of GP surgeries and Primary Care Networks across the country.

So – how can innovation help?

Automation in primary care

Many of the tasks administrative staff currently need to complete are highly repetitive, often involving transcribing data from forms into IT systems, or from one system to another.

This makes some low-risk tasks (such as rostering of staff) ideal use cases for automation – freeing up administrators to work on more complex tasks while also improving accuracy, speeding up processes, and boosting staff and patient satisfaction.

Last year, the Health Innovation Network South London and the NHS England (London) Digital First team partnered for an Automation Grants programme, trialling automation and AI-based innovations in primary care. The results of these local pilots showed the potential of automation – with more than 18,000 automated patient registrations recorded, 20,000 pathology results reviewed and filed, and many other positive outcomes.

In-depth: Healthtech-1

One of the innovations successfully tested during the Automation Grants programme was Healthtech-1, a solution focused on automating the patient registration process for GPs.

During their pilot in Lambeth, the Healthtech-1 solution achieved impressive results. Some of the results highlighted during Healthtech-1’s presentation at the recent Health Tech and South London Innovation Event included:

Healthtech-1’s tools have now gained significant momentum across south London and the wider region thanks to their real-world impact. The innovation has rolled out to almost 800 GP practices across the country, and now powers about 1 in 10 new patient registrations in England.

As co-founder Raj Kohli explains, much of their success has stemmed from establishing a deep understanding of the problems faced by primary care teams before starting to build a solution:

“It’s become a bit of a cliché for technology companies to say that they live and breathe the world of their customers, but I think we can justify that statement.

“As well as family connections to working in GP-land, we’ve chosen office space which we share with a practice. Myself and my co-founder did thousands of patient registrations by hand when we first got set up – so I think we can appreciate the reality of what teams are facing.

“We’d like to think our innovations are the things that practice teams would build themselves if they had the time, space and resources to do so.”

Now being used by 13% of practices nationally, the Healthtech-1 team have also benefited from support from programmes such as DigitalHealth.London’s Accelerator:

“DigitalHealth.London was invaluable to our journey. They introduced us to some of our first customers (Dr Annie Murphy), helped us get our first funded ICB pilot (South West London ICB), and networked us with other innovators (Andrew Bailey at Convenet) - who introduced us to our 2nd hire and founding clinician (Dr Lydia van Hamel Parsons)."