Meet the innovator: James Aitman

Tell us about your innovation in a sentence:

JifJaff is a highly scalable (practice and PCN to ICS) tailored automated replication of both clinical and administrative workflows for primary care, delivered as a service.

What was the ‘lightbulb’ moment?

My light bulb moment was "on a basic level", having had a generic blood test that showed no issues. I rang my practice to find out my results, and in doing so, blocked other patients from calling and used an administrator's time to take a message. Then the practice had to allocate more time by booking a call to tell me there were no issues. In the call, I was also told a clinician had reviewed the results.

I put the phone down, looked at the report and thought we could make something to read the results and make a predefined (clinically-led) decision if a follow-up is required. If not, the system could automatically generate an SMS to let me know everything is fine and I don't need to call. We can free up clinical and administrative time and support improved patient care. That was the catalyst to review multiple clinical and administrative tasks that needed to be done in primary care and automate them as much as possible. It was a busy two years of research!

What three bits of advice would you give budding innovators?

1. Know your market

2. Take the time to understand the problem you are solving

3. Be patient and do things properly

What’s been your toughest obstacle?

Finding the people that need our products.

What’s been your innovator journey highlight?

Seeing our clients’ faces when they watch their mouse move around the screen, following clinically led rules to safely do the work for the team. They see how using our tailored automation products can improve patient care, free clinical time, lower cost and enable them to spend more time focusing on patients that require support rather than admin—reviewing blood tests, coding, filing, LTC, repeat prescriptions, patient registrations and more. This helps people to understand that the products don’t have to only be used at the practice level but can also easily be scaled to PCNs, Federations and ICSs.

Best part of your job now?

Meeting new people and designing new automation for healthcare.

If you were in charge of the NHS and care system, what’s the one thing you’d do to speed up health innovation?

Access to more funding!

A typical day for you would include…

Showing demonstrations and sitting with our innovation hub, having our products reviewed by practice owners, PCN directors, management at federations and strategic ICS leaders.

You can find JifJaff on Twitter and LinkedIn.

JifJaff are holding an invite-only private event in London on Thursday 27 April to build awareness around the automation work we do nationally in primary care. The event is for senior members of staff with responsibility in primary care (ideally ICS/ICB/Gov/NHS) to showcase the art of the possible with hyper automation at scale.

Places are limited to 15 people and going quickly, so if you or any of your networks would like to attend, please register here.