New documentary shares behind the scenes of Healthtech-1 as they try to fix our NHS.

LONDON, ENGLAND (6th November 2024) — A new documentary series, What will it actually take to fix the NHS?, launches today.

The 8-part series features voices from across the NHS and will follow East London start-up Healthtech-1, capturing the highs and lows as they strive to make the NHS the most advanced healthcare system in the world.

Wes Streeting has stated that the significant additional funding for the NHS contained in this October’s budget must be combined with reform to drive the required improvement. The Health Secretary says a shift “from analogue to digital” is needed to build a healthcare service fit for the future. This series follows a small, committed team of NHS staff, operators and engineers and will explore the extent to which technology and improvements in primary care can help fix the NHS.  

Watch episode 1 today 🎥

Best friends Raj and Pete are co-founders of Healthtech-1. They went to school together in East London. Pete’s parents came to the UK from China in their 40s, speaking little to no English, but with grand ambitions. They ran a takeaway, where Pete would help out in the evenings and on weekends.

Raj’s father, Dr Kohli, is a GP, and now both his parents now work at the First 4 Health Group of GP surgeries in Stratford. After university, Pete worked as a software engineer at Monzo and Raj worked at Accenture. Both had the itch to start their own business. 

Pete explained, “It really started as two very good friends wanting to work together and see what the world has to offer if we just fully applied ourselves and gave ourselves to the world.” They launched a growth agency called twenty-twenty on January 1st, 2020, but within months, the COVID-19 pandemic had changed their plans. 

Raj’s parents’ GP surgery came under immense pressure as the pandemic forced them to take nearly all of their work online. They asked Raj and Pete if they could help them make the transition. Raj was initially reluctant to work with his mum and dad and refused, but eventually, Pete convinced him to do the honourable thing and support his parents. 

At Stratford Village Surgery, they redesigned the triage system. Now, the surgery completes every patient request within 15 hours, and they manage 3,000 online requests every single week (a request can include arranging appointments, self-referrals, requesting additional information, or referring patients to a pharmacy). This led to the surgery becoming a national blueprint. Pete and Raj then worked on automating the patient registration process - an error prone, manual task that takes around 15 minutes to complete for each patient. 

They were particularly motivated to make NHS receptionists’ lives easier.

Raj, now an NHS Clinical Entrepreneur, says, “These people are so underserved by society. The technology they work with is ridiculous. You get abused at the front desk, no gratitude from patients. I mean, at least doctors are respected, but the admin staff in GP practice don't get that respect. And they feel it, they feel it.” 

Raj and Pete realised that this could be an automation product with significant, lasting impact. They created a patient registration product (named after the registration clerk who taught them how) and began rolling it out to new GP surgeries. Today, Healthtech-1 powers 1 in 7 new patient registration in England across over 15% of the nation’s GP practices. They’ve now saved the NHS 124 years of staff time.  

A vow to bring the best technology to the world's best healthcare system 🚀

Healthtech-1 has gone on to be accepted  into Y Combinator, the world’s most prestigious start-up accelerator, based in San Francisco. With a reported acceptance rate of between 1.5% and 3%, Y Combinator is fiercely competitive, but Healthtech-1 earned a place in their 2023 batch, selected by Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield. The team vowed to bring the world’s best technology back to the NHS. Y Combinator, along with London-based VC Moonfire, then led Healthtech-1’s £2.7 million seed funding round in September 2023. 

The team remains co-located in the Stratford Village Surgery and each new team member starts by spending a week working as an NHS receptionist. They’re building more automations to save clinical time and improve patients’ experience. 

The Government committed to adding 2 million appointments to the system. If Raj, Pete, and the Healthtech-1 team brought their second automation (test result filing) to just 46% of the nation’s GP practices and automated only half of that workload they could add the equivalent of 2 million appointments per year.

Raj Kohli said that they believe they’ll be able to make more of an impact on the NHS than the new Government, and in four years time they plan to review who has had a greater positive influence on: 

• NHS staff time saved (So far they’ve saved 241,933 hours in total)

• Patient time saved (960,838 registrations x 3 days saved /365 days  = 7,897 years saved waiting for care)

• Capacity added (10,342 appointments in total so far) 

• Patient satisfaction (9.8/10 over 100,000 patient reviews)

So, what will it actually take to fix the NHS? 💙

Follow the Healthtech-1 team on this journey and see if they can achieve their goals. The series is produced by Gather, a publication that tells stories about purpose-driven businesses and campaigns in the UK. The series is produced by Sam Matthews and Joe Wilmot.   

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