Case Study
NHS South East London ICB
Rosie and Matthew
December 12, 2024
Increasing access, powering productivity, and creating capacity for GP practices in South East London — NHS South East London ICB recognised that manual new patient registrations were time consuming, prone to errors, and delayed patients' access to GP services. Following the success of a pilot in Lambeth, the ICB rolled out Automated Registrations across their practices. Upon evaluation, the results were outstanding…
⚡ 72% of the ICBs practices choosing to take up Automated Registrations
🚀 92% of 64,000 registrations automated, giving patients same-day access to care
💙 16,000 hours of staff time liberated, resulting in an estimated cost saving of £240,000 for general practice
⭐ Average wait time for registration reduced from 3 days to less than 24 hours
As of December 2024, 72% of practices in South East London automate their new patient registrations. The scale of this rollout was only possible because of a year-long pilot led by practices in Lambeth, co-designing the solution with clinicians and creating a blueprint for the ICB to follow.
The initial year-long pilot spearheaded by Lambeth GP Federation, Lambeth Together, and NHS England achieved 80% adoption by practices of Healthtech-1’s Automated Registrations, saving 8,242 admin staff hours and £64,000 for practices.
Recognising the potential of these benefits at scale, the ICB initiated the first automation roll-out of this size by developing a robust clinical framework to ensure highest clinical safety and compliance standards.
"If I can protect clinical and staff teams by reducing their workload, it means they won't move anywhere, they're happy, and they'll have much longer relationships with patients!" — Louise Cobbett-Witten, Binfield Road Surgery
The challenge 🤔
In South East London alone, 12% of patients reported being unable to reach their GP practice when needed, especially during peak times like early mornings. The NHS is under immense pressure, facing growing patient backlogs, declining patient satisfaction, poor staff retention and overstretched resources.
Before automating, the manual registration process had been time-consuming, potentially contained errors, and could delay patients' access to a GP practice. For every GP, there are 2.5 administrative staff needed to complete the repetitive, paper-based tasks in primary care.
Practices completed registrations manually taking 15 minutes per registration. Staff costs work out to be £3.75 per registration. Patients experienced an average wait time to be registered of 4 days. Patient satisfaction was low, and practices weren’t optimising their QOF prevalence.
The ICB rollout aimed to:
Increase capacity in primary care by reducing time on repetitive registration tasks 📊
Enhance speed of access to care 💬
Reduce human error in clinical coding of patient details by automating ✅
"Registrations were all manual. And this was a lot of administrative time and errors in having things coded correctly. So all that was taking time and we needed to reduce that time. From a patient perspective, it was taking several weeks in some cases for them to actually register with the practice." — Patience Makunike, NHS South East London ICB
The solution ⭐
Automating registrations relieves administrative pressure within GP practices. The benefits of this include: increasing speed of access for patients, increasing productivity and efficiency in primary care, practices can guarantee same-day registration with all clinical coding done for them, whilst safely matching the patient to their NHS record.
As digital pioneers, Lambeth GP Federation and Lambeth Together recognised the substantial benefits from automating registrations with Healthtech-1, and won funding available through the Health Innovation Network South London to implement a year-long federation wide pilot for their 40 practices.
As a true measure of success and value, practices were asked to self-fund after the pilot. To set Lambeth practices up for success, Lambeth and Healthtech-1 underwent a rigorous clinical safeguarding co-design process to ensure the registration form and automation process met the highest clinical standards.
The Lambeth pilot saw a hugely successful adoption rate, with 78% of practices using Automated Registrations. Of these 40 practices, 31 have continued to automate beyond the pilot phase showing true value and impact for practices. The Lambeth pilot alone saved practices 8,242 hours of administrative time, £63,400 cost saving, with a 500% increase in coded patient health data.
“Automated Registrations is so much more efficient than having a staff member doing it. Saves money and time and new patients are much happier. It also saves receptionists time with fewer phone calls asking about the status of their registration. It has reduced staff stress around registrations massively since we've been using Healthtech-1.” — Louise Cobbett-Witten, Binfield Road Surgery
Recognising the substantial benefits from the Lambeth pilot, NHS South East London ICB funded an ICB-wide registration automation pilot starting in July 2023. The 6 month pilot was extended into an 18 month pilot to increase the benefits at scale. Extensions were enabled by additional funding secured by the ICB from NHS England that had to be used for automation initiatives.
An automation pilot of this size had not been done before so NHS South East London ICB and Healthtech-1 became thought leaders in governance and compliance processes, including novel data protection protocols, to ensure practices could adhere to highest standards.
"We were going from 17 data points from the old process to over 85 now — that's a 500x increase! That's amazing, right?" — Dr Lucy Goodeve-Docker, Lambeth Digital Lead
The results 💙
140 of the 193 practices in South East London adopted Automated Registrations, an incredible 72% uptake.
During the evaluation period, 92% of all registrations were fully automated, giving patients same-day access to care. This created an estimated cost saving of £240,000 for general practice.
"At 3 days saved on average per registration we have saved patients 530 years of waiting for care." — Philippa Kirkpatrick, NHS South East London ICB
Due to time saved on registrations and increased capacity, practice staff were able to complete higher value tasks such as care navigation, referring into the Pharmacy First scheme, QOF call and recall, and document management enabling admin staff to spend more time providing care to patients.
"We're at around 9,000 registrations a month just for South East London that are being automated. If you think about the time that's being saved for those patients, that's phenomenal!" — Sharon Sheldon, NHS South East London ICB
The learnings 💙
Both Healthtech-1 and NHS South East London ICB have become thought leaders in automation at scale. Following the success of the pilot, NHS South East London ICB has launched another automation pilot with Healthtech-1 for Automated Lab Filing. The ICB was also a finalist in the HSJ Awards 2024 for a programme of Primary Care digital transformation work that included rolling out Automated Registrations.
Clinical safeguarding 🏥 — This was co-produced with clinical leads during the Lambeth Federation Pilot, and enhanced for the ICB-wide roll out. This included attaining DCB0160.
NHS South East London’s Digital Change Managers ✨ — These innovation champions were integral to the extremely successful 73% adoption rate of automated registrations. They worked hand in hand with practices to increase awareness, to educate and build confidence in practices consistently over the pilot.
Cross-ICB working groups 👏 — There was no regulation or best practice for an automation roll out of this size, so a cross-disciplinary team (including ICT and Data Protection) was essential to developing new governance, compliance, and safety protocols.
Expressions of interest 📝 — Practices were given the choice to join the pilot and were empowered to join at a time that worked best for them.
No lock-in contracts 🔑 — Healthtech-1 believes that practices should only be using technology they find valuable so can leave anytime with stop/start contracts.
Continuous improvement 🌀 — Healthtech-1 maintained an Automation Working Group including representatives from the ICB, Digital Change Managers, Healthtech-1, and practices to gather feedback from practices and implement changes throughout the pilot. Practices were encouraged to feedback to the ICB, and ICB staff responded to every comment.
"Absolutely enjoyed the pilot. I think 140 out of 193 was beyond what we expected! And so that was quite a nice thing to achieve. And also the real difference that it's made in terms of reducing workload and improving patient experience." — Patience Makunike, NHS South East London ICB
Thank you to NHS South East London ICB, Binfield Road Surgery, Lambeth Together, and Lambeth GP Federation for their support throughout the automation rollout and efforts in evaluating and sharing their stories.
This film features:
Dr Lucy Goodeve-Docker, Lambeth Digital Lead
Louise Cobbett-Witten, Practice Manager at Binfield Road Surgery
Sharon Sheldon, Head of Digital Transformation (Primary Care) at NHS South East London ICB
Patience Makunike, Senior Business Analyst at NHS South East London ICB
Dr Lydia van Hamel-Parsons, NHS GP and Founding Clinician at Healthtech-1
Rosie Baker, ICB Specialist at Healthtech-1
Matthew Payne, Catalyst at Healthtech-1
—
Contact
If you'd like to learn more about automation at scale for your ICB, contact rosie@healthtech1.uk and matthew@healthtech1.uk.
For press enquiries, please contact press@healthtech1.uk and find more in our Press Kit.
Increasing access, powering productivity, and creating capacity for GP practices in South East London — NHS South East London ICB recognised that manual new patient registrations were time consuming, prone to errors, and delayed patients' access to GP services. Following the success of a pilot in Lambeth, the ICB rolled out Automated Registrations across their practices. Upon evaluation, the results were outstanding…
⚡ 72% of the ICBs practices choosing to take up Automated Registrations
🚀 92% of 64,000 registrations automated, giving patients same-day access to care
💙 16,000 hours of staff time liberated, resulting in an estimated cost saving of £240,000 for general practice
⭐ Average wait time for registration reduced from 3 days to less than 24 hours
As of December 2024, 72% of practices in South East London automate their new patient registrations. The scale of this rollout was only possible because of a year-long pilot led by practices in Lambeth, co-designing the solution with clinicians and creating a blueprint for the ICB to follow.
The initial year-long pilot spearheaded by Lambeth GP Federation, Lambeth Together, and NHS England achieved 80% adoption by practices of Healthtech-1’s Automated Registrations, saving 8,242 admin staff hours and £64,000 for practices.
Recognising the potential of these benefits at scale, the ICB initiated the first automation roll-out of this size by developing a robust clinical framework to ensure highest clinical safety and compliance standards.
"If I can protect clinical and staff teams by reducing their workload, it means they won't move anywhere, they're happy, and they'll have much longer relationships with patients!" — Louise Cobbett-Witten, Binfield Road Surgery
The challenge 🤔
In South East London alone, 12% of patients reported being unable to reach their GP practice when needed, especially during peak times like early mornings. The NHS is under immense pressure, facing growing patient backlogs, declining patient satisfaction, poor staff retention and overstretched resources.
Before automating, the manual registration process had been time-consuming, potentially contained errors, and could delay patients' access to a GP practice. For every GP, there are 2.5 administrative staff needed to complete the repetitive, paper-based tasks in primary care.
Practices completed registrations manually taking 15 minutes per registration. Staff costs work out to be £3.75 per registration. Patients experienced an average wait time to be registered of 4 days. Patient satisfaction was low, and practices weren’t optimising their QOF prevalence.
The ICB rollout aimed to:
Increase capacity in primary care by reducing time on repetitive registration tasks 📊
Enhance speed of access to care 💬
Reduce human error in clinical coding of patient details by automating ✅
"Registrations were all manual. And this was a lot of administrative time and errors in having things coded correctly. So all that was taking time and we needed to reduce that time. From a patient perspective, it was taking several weeks in some cases for them to actually register with the practice." — Patience Makunike, NHS South East London ICB
The solution ⭐
Automating registrations relieves administrative pressure within GP practices. The benefits of this include: increasing speed of access for patients, increasing productivity and efficiency in primary care, practices can guarantee same-day registration with all clinical coding done for them, whilst safely matching the patient to their NHS record.
As digital pioneers, Lambeth GP Federation and Lambeth Together recognised the substantial benefits from automating registrations with Healthtech-1, and won funding available through the Health Innovation Network South London to implement a year-long federation wide pilot for their 40 practices.
As a true measure of success and value, practices were asked to self-fund after the pilot. To set Lambeth practices up for success, Lambeth and Healthtech-1 underwent a rigorous clinical safeguarding co-design process to ensure the registration form and automation process met the highest clinical standards.
The Lambeth pilot saw a hugely successful adoption rate, with 78% of practices using Automated Registrations. Of these 40 practices, 31 have continued to automate beyond the pilot phase showing true value and impact for practices. The Lambeth pilot alone saved practices 8,242 hours of administrative time, £63,400 cost saving, with a 500% increase in coded patient health data.
“Automated Registrations is so much more efficient than having a staff member doing it. Saves money and time and new patients are much happier. It also saves receptionists time with fewer phone calls asking about the status of their registration. It has reduced staff stress around registrations massively since we've been using Healthtech-1.” — Louise Cobbett-Witten, Binfield Road Surgery
Recognising the substantial benefits from the Lambeth pilot, NHS South East London ICB funded an ICB-wide registration automation pilot starting in July 2023. The 6 month pilot was extended into an 18 month pilot to increase the benefits at scale. Extensions were enabled by additional funding secured by the ICB from NHS England that had to be used for automation initiatives.
An automation pilot of this size had not been done before so NHS South East London ICB and Healthtech-1 became thought leaders in governance and compliance processes, including novel data protection protocols, to ensure practices could adhere to highest standards.
"We were going from 17 data points from the old process to over 85 now — that's a 500x increase! That's amazing, right?" — Dr Lucy Goodeve-Docker, Lambeth Digital Lead
The results 💙
140 of the 193 practices in South East London adopted Automated Registrations, an incredible 72% uptake.
During the evaluation period, 92% of all registrations were fully automated, giving patients same-day access to care. This created an estimated cost saving of £240,000 for general practice.
"At 3 days saved on average per registration we have saved patients 530 years of waiting for care." — Philippa Kirkpatrick, NHS South East London ICB
Due to time saved on registrations and increased capacity, practice staff were able to complete higher value tasks such as care navigation, referring into the Pharmacy First scheme, QOF call and recall, and document management enabling admin staff to spend more time providing care to patients.
"We're at around 9,000 registrations a month just for South East London that are being automated. If you think about the time that's being saved for those patients, that's phenomenal!" — Sharon Sheldon, NHS South East London ICB
The learnings 💙
Both Healthtech-1 and NHS South East London ICB have become thought leaders in automation at scale. Following the success of the pilot, NHS South East London ICB has launched another automation pilot with Healthtech-1 for Automated Lab Filing. The ICB was also a finalist in the HSJ Awards 2024 for a programme of Primary Care digital transformation work that included rolling out Automated Registrations.
Clinical safeguarding 🏥 — This was co-produced with clinical leads during the Lambeth Federation Pilot, and enhanced for the ICB-wide roll out. This included attaining DCB0160.
NHS South East London’s Digital Change Managers ✨ — These innovation champions were integral to the extremely successful 73% adoption rate of automated registrations. They worked hand in hand with practices to increase awareness, to educate and build confidence in practices consistently over the pilot.
Cross-ICB working groups 👏 — There was no regulation or best practice for an automation roll out of this size, so a cross-disciplinary team (including ICT and Data Protection) was essential to developing new governance, compliance, and safety protocols.
Expressions of interest 📝 — Practices were given the choice to join the pilot and were empowered to join at a time that worked best for them.
No lock-in contracts 🔑 — Healthtech-1 believes that practices should only be using technology they find valuable so can leave anytime with stop/start contracts.
Continuous improvement 🌀 — Healthtech-1 maintained an Automation Working Group including representatives from the ICB, Digital Change Managers, Healthtech-1, and practices to gather feedback from practices and implement changes throughout the pilot. Practices were encouraged to feedback to the ICB, and ICB staff responded to every comment.
"Absolutely enjoyed the pilot. I think 140 out of 193 was beyond what we expected! And so that was quite a nice thing to achieve. And also the real difference that it's made in terms of reducing workload and improving patient experience." — Patience Makunike, NHS South East London ICB
Thank you to NHS South East London ICB, Binfield Road Surgery, Lambeth Together, and Lambeth GP Federation for their support throughout the automation rollout and efforts in evaluating and sharing their stories.
This film features:
Dr Lucy Goodeve-Docker, Lambeth Digital Lead
Louise Cobbett-Witten, Practice Manager at Binfield Road Surgery
Sharon Sheldon, Head of Digital Transformation (Primary Care) at NHS South East London ICB
Patience Makunike, Senior Business Analyst at NHS South East London ICB
Dr Lydia van Hamel-Parsons, NHS GP and Founding Clinician at Healthtech-1
Rosie Baker, ICB Specialist at Healthtech-1
Matthew Payne, Catalyst at Healthtech-1
—
Contact
If you'd like to learn more about automation at scale for your ICB, contact rosie@healthtech1.uk and matthew@healthtech1.uk.
For press enquiries, please contact press@healthtech1.uk and find more in our Press Kit.
Increasing access, powering productivity, and creating capacity for GP practices in South East London — NHS South East London ICB recognised that manual new patient registrations were time consuming, prone to errors, and delayed patients' access to GP services. Following the success of a pilot in Lambeth, the ICB rolled out Automated Registrations across their practices. Upon evaluation, the results were outstanding…
⚡ 72% of the ICBs practices choosing to take up Automated Registrations
🚀 92% of 64,000 registrations automated, giving patients same-day access to care
💙 16,000 hours of staff time liberated, resulting in an estimated cost saving of £240,000 for general practice
⭐ Average wait time for registration reduced from 3 days to less than 24 hours
As of December 2024, 72% of practices in South East London automate their new patient registrations. The scale of this rollout was only possible because of a year-long pilot led by practices in Lambeth, co-designing the solution with clinicians and creating a blueprint for the ICB to follow.
The initial year-long pilot spearheaded by Lambeth GP Federation, Lambeth Together, and NHS England achieved 80% adoption by practices of Healthtech-1’s Automated Registrations, saving 8,242 admin staff hours and £64,000 for practices.
Recognising the potential of these benefits at scale, the ICB initiated the first automation roll-out of this size by developing a robust clinical framework to ensure highest clinical safety and compliance standards.
"If I can protect clinical and staff teams by reducing their workload, it means they won't move anywhere, they're happy, and they'll have much longer relationships with patients!" — Louise Cobbett-Witten, Binfield Road Surgery
The challenge 🤔
In South East London alone, 12% of patients reported being unable to reach their GP practice when needed, especially during peak times like early mornings. The NHS is under immense pressure, facing growing patient backlogs, declining patient satisfaction, poor staff retention and overstretched resources.
Before automating, the manual registration process had been time-consuming, potentially contained errors, and could delay patients' access to a GP practice. For every GP, there are 2.5 administrative staff needed to complete the repetitive, paper-based tasks in primary care.
Practices completed registrations manually taking 15 minutes per registration. Staff costs work out to be £3.75 per registration. Patients experienced an average wait time to be registered of 4 days. Patient satisfaction was low, and practices weren’t optimising their QOF prevalence.
The ICB rollout aimed to:
Increase capacity in primary care by reducing time on repetitive registration tasks 📊
Enhance speed of access to care 💬
Reduce human error in clinical coding of patient details by automating ✅
"Registrations were all manual. And this was a lot of administrative time and errors in having things coded correctly. So all that was taking time and we needed to reduce that time. From a patient perspective, it was taking several weeks in some cases for them to actually register with the practice." — Patience Makunike, NHS South East London ICB
The solution ⭐
Automating registrations relieves administrative pressure within GP practices. The benefits of this include: increasing speed of access for patients, increasing productivity and efficiency in primary care, practices can guarantee same-day registration with all clinical coding done for them, whilst safely matching the patient to their NHS record.
As digital pioneers, Lambeth GP Federation and Lambeth Together recognised the substantial benefits from automating registrations with Healthtech-1, and won funding available through the Health Innovation Network South London to implement a year-long federation wide pilot for their 40 practices.
As a true measure of success and value, practices were asked to self-fund after the pilot. To set Lambeth practices up for success, Lambeth and Healthtech-1 underwent a rigorous clinical safeguarding co-design process to ensure the registration form and automation process met the highest clinical standards.
The Lambeth pilot saw a hugely successful adoption rate, with 78% of practices using Automated Registrations. Of these 40 practices, 31 have continued to automate beyond the pilot phase showing true value and impact for practices. The Lambeth pilot alone saved practices 8,242 hours of administrative time, £63,400 cost saving, with a 500% increase in coded patient health data.
“Automated Registrations is so much more efficient than having a staff member doing it. Saves money and time and new patients are much happier. It also saves receptionists time with fewer phone calls asking about the status of their registration. It has reduced staff stress around registrations massively since we've been using Healthtech-1.” — Louise Cobbett-Witten, Binfield Road Surgery
Recognising the substantial benefits from the Lambeth pilot, NHS South East London ICB funded an ICB-wide registration automation pilot starting in July 2023. The 6 month pilot was extended into an 18 month pilot to increase the benefits at scale. Extensions were enabled by additional funding secured by the ICB from NHS England that had to be used for automation initiatives.
An automation pilot of this size had not been done before so NHS South East London ICB and Healthtech-1 became thought leaders in governance and compliance processes, including novel data protection protocols, to ensure practices could adhere to highest standards.
"We were going from 17 data points from the old process to over 85 now — that's a 500x increase! That's amazing, right?" — Dr Lucy Goodeve-Docker, Lambeth Digital Lead
The results 💙
140 of the 193 practices in South East London adopted Automated Registrations, an incredible 72% uptake.
During the evaluation period, 92% of all registrations were fully automated, giving patients same-day access to care. This created an estimated cost saving of £240,000 for general practice.
"At 3 days saved on average per registration we have saved patients 530 years of waiting for care." — Philippa Kirkpatrick, NHS South East London ICB
Due to time saved on registrations and increased capacity, practice staff were able to complete higher value tasks such as care navigation, referring into the Pharmacy First scheme, QOF call and recall, and document management enabling admin staff to spend more time providing care to patients.
"We're at around 9,000 registrations a month just for South East London that are being automated. If you think about the time that's being saved for those patients, that's phenomenal!" — Sharon Sheldon, NHS South East London ICB
The learnings 💙
Both Healthtech-1 and NHS South East London ICB have become thought leaders in automation at scale. Following the success of the pilot, NHS South East London ICB has launched another automation pilot with Healthtech-1 for Automated Lab Filing. The ICB was also a finalist in the HSJ Awards 2024 for a programme of Primary Care digital transformation work that included rolling out Automated Registrations.
Clinical safeguarding 🏥 — This was co-produced with clinical leads during the Lambeth Federation Pilot, and enhanced for the ICB-wide roll out. This included attaining DCB0160.
NHS South East London’s Digital Change Managers ✨ — These innovation champions were integral to the extremely successful 73% adoption rate of automated registrations. They worked hand in hand with practices to increase awareness, to educate and build confidence in practices consistently over the pilot.
Cross-ICB working groups 👏 — There was no regulation or best practice for an automation roll out of this size, so a cross-disciplinary team (including ICT and Data Protection) was essential to developing new governance, compliance, and safety protocols.
Expressions of interest 📝 — Practices were given the choice to join the pilot and were empowered to join at a time that worked best for them.
No lock-in contracts 🔑 — Healthtech-1 believes that practices should only be using technology they find valuable so can leave anytime with stop/start contracts.
Continuous improvement 🌀 — Healthtech-1 maintained an Automation Working Group including representatives from the ICB, Digital Change Managers, Healthtech-1, and practices to gather feedback from practices and implement changes throughout the pilot. Practices were encouraged to feedback to the ICB, and ICB staff responded to every comment.
"Absolutely enjoyed the pilot. I think 140 out of 193 was beyond what we expected! And so that was quite a nice thing to achieve. And also the real difference that it's made in terms of reducing workload and improving patient experience." — Patience Makunike, NHS South East London ICB
Thank you to NHS South East London ICB, Binfield Road Surgery, Lambeth Together, and Lambeth GP Federation for their support throughout the automation rollout and efforts in evaluating and sharing their stories.
This film features:
Dr Lucy Goodeve-Docker, Lambeth Digital Lead
Louise Cobbett-Witten, Practice Manager at Binfield Road Surgery
Sharon Sheldon, Head of Digital Transformation (Primary Care) at NHS South East London ICB
Patience Makunike, Senior Business Analyst at NHS South East London ICB
Dr Lydia van Hamel-Parsons, NHS GP and Founding Clinician at Healthtech-1
Rosie Baker, ICB Specialist at Healthtech-1
Matthew Payne, Catalyst at Healthtech-1
—
Contact
If you'd like to learn more about automation at scale for your ICB, contact rosie@healthtech1.uk and matthew@healthtech1.uk.
For press enquiries, please contact press@healthtech1.uk and find more in our Press Kit.
Increasing access, powering productivity, and creating capacity for GP practices in South East London — NHS South East London ICB recognised that manual new patient registrations were time consuming, prone to errors, and delayed patients' access to GP services. Following the success of a pilot in Lambeth, the ICB rolled out Automated Registrations across their practices. Upon evaluation, the results were outstanding…
⚡ 72% of the ICBs practices choosing to take up Automated Registrations
🚀 92% of 64,000 registrations automated, giving patients same-day access to care
💙 16,000 hours of staff time liberated, resulting in an estimated cost saving of £240,000 for general practice
⭐ Average wait time for registration reduced from 3 days to less than 24 hours
As of December 2024, 72% of practices in South East London automate their new patient registrations. The scale of this rollout was only possible because of a year-long pilot led by practices in Lambeth, co-designing the solution with clinicians and creating a blueprint for the ICB to follow.
The initial year-long pilot spearheaded by Lambeth GP Federation, Lambeth Together, and NHS England achieved 80% adoption by practices of Healthtech-1’s Automated Registrations, saving 8,242 admin staff hours and £64,000 for practices.
Recognising the potential of these benefits at scale, the ICB initiated the first automation roll-out of this size by developing a robust clinical framework to ensure highest clinical safety and compliance standards.
"If I can protect clinical and staff teams by reducing their workload, it means they won't move anywhere, they're happy, and they'll have much longer relationships with patients!" — Louise Cobbett-Witten, Binfield Road Surgery
The challenge 🤔
In South East London alone, 12% of patients reported being unable to reach their GP practice when needed, especially during peak times like early mornings. The NHS is under immense pressure, facing growing patient backlogs, declining patient satisfaction, poor staff retention and overstretched resources.
Before automating, the manual registration process had been time-consuming, potentially contained errors, and could delay patients' access to a GP practice. For every GP, there are 2.5 administrative staff needed to complete the repetitive, paper-based tasks in primary care.
Practices completed registrations manually taking 15 minutes per registration. Staff costs work out to be £3.75 per registration. Patients experienced an average wait time to be registered of 4 days. Patient satisfaction was low, and practices weren’t optimising their QOF prevalence.
The ICB rollout aimed to:
Increase capacity in primary care by reducing time on repetitive registration tasks 📊
Enhance speed of access to care 💬
Reduce human error in clinical coding of patient details by automating ✅
"Registrations were all manual. And this was a lot of administrative time and errors in having things coded correctly. So all that was taking time and we needed to reduce that time. From a patient perspective, it was taking several weeks in some cases for them to actually register with the practice." — Patience Makunike, NHS South East London ICB
The solution ⭐
Automating registrations relieves administrative pressure within GP practices. The benefits of this include: increasing speed of access for patients, increasing productivity and efficiency in primary care, practices can guarantee same-day registration with all clinical coding done for them, whilst safely matching the patient to their NHS record.
As digital pioneers, Lambeth GP Federation and Lambeth Together recognised the substantial benefits from automating registrations with Healthtech-1, and won funding available through the Health Innovation Network South London to implement a year-long federation wide pilot for their 40 practices.
As a true measure of success and value, practices were asked to self-fund after the pilot. To set Lambeth practices up for success, Lambeth and Healthtech-1 underwent a rigorous clinical safeguarding co-design process to ensure the registration form and automation process met the highest clinical standards.
The Lambeth pilot saw a hugely successful adoption rate, with 78% of practices using Automated Registrations. Of these 40 practices, 31 have continued to automate beyond the pilot phase showing true value and impact for practices. The Lambeth pilot alone saved practices 8,242 hours of administrative time, £63,400 cost saving, with a 500% increase in coded patient health data.
“Automated Registrations is so much more efficient than having a staff member doing it. Saves money and time and new patients are much happier. It also saves receptionists time with fewer phone calls asking about the status of their registration. It has reduced staff stress around registrations massively since we've been using Healthtech-1.” — Louise Cobbett-Witten, Binfield Road Surgery
Recognising the substantial benefits from the Lambeth pilot, NHS South East London ICB funded an ICB-wide registration automation pilot starting in July 2023. The 6 month pilot was extended into an 18 month pilot to increase the benefits at scale. Extensions were enabled by additional funding secured by the ICB from NHS England that had to be used for automation initiatives.
An automation pilot of this size had not been done before so NHS South East London ICB and Healthtech-1 became thought leaders in governance and compliance processes, including novel data protection protocols, to ensure practices could adhere to highest standards.
"We were going from 17 data points from the old process to over 85 now — that's a 500x increase! That's amazing, right?" — Dr Lucy Goodeve-Docker, Lambeth Digital Lead
The results 💙
140 of the 193 practices in South East London adopted Automated Registrations, an incredible 72% uptake.
During the evaluation period, 92% of all registrations were fully automated, giving patients same-day access to care. This created an estimated cost saving of £240,000 for general practice.
"At 3 days saved on average per registration we have saved patients 530 years of waiting for care." — Philippa Kirkpatrick, NHS South East London ICB
Due to time saved on registrations and increased capacity, practice staff were able to complete higher value tasks such as care navigation, referring into the Pharmacy First scheme, QOF call and recall, and document management enabling admin staff to spend more time providing care to patients.
"We're at around 9,000 registrations a month just for South East London that are being automated. If you think about the time that's being saved for those patients, that's phenomenal!" — Sharon Sheldon, NHS South East London ICB
The learnings 💙
Both Healthtech-1 and NHS South East London ICB have become thought leaders in automation at scale. Following the success of the pilot, NHS South East London ICB has launched another automation pilot with Healthtech-1 for Automated Lab Filing. The ICB was also a finalist in the HSJ Awards 2024 for a programme of Primary Care digital transformation work that included rolling out Automated Registrations.
Clinical safeguarding 🏥 — This was co-produced with clinical leads during the Lambeth Federation Pilot, and enhanced for the ICB-wide roll out. This included attaining DCB0160.
NHS South East London’s Digital Change Managers ✨ — These innovation champions were integral to the extremely successful 73% adoption rate of automated registrations. They worked hand in hand with practices to increase awareness, to educate and build confidence in practices consistently over the pilot.
Cross-ICB working groups 👏 — There was no regulation or best practice for an automation roll out of this size, so a cross-disciplinary team (including ICT and Data Protection) was essential to developing new governance, compliance, and safety protocols.
Expressions of interest 📝 — Practices were given the choice to join the pilot and were empowered to join at a time that worked best for them.
No lock-in contracts 🔑 — Healthtech-1 believes that practices should only be using technology they find valuable so can leave anytime with stop/start contracts.
Continuous improvement 🌀 — Healthtech-1 maintained an Automation Working Group including representatives from the ICB, Digital Change Managers, Healthtech-1, and practices to gather feedback from practices and implement changes throughout the pilot. Practices were encouraged to feedback to the ICB, and ICB staff responded to every comment.
"Absolutely enjoyed the pilot. I think 140 out of 193 was beyond what we expected! And so that was quite a nice thing to achieve. And also the real difference that it's made in terms of reducing workload and improving patient experience." — Patience Makunike, NHS South East London ICB
Thank you to NHS South East London ICB, Binfield Road Surgery, Lambeth Together, and Lambeth GP Federation for their support throughout the automation rollout and efforts in evaluating and sharing their stories.
This film features:
Dr Lucy Goodeve-Docker, Lambeth Digital Lead
Louise Cobbett-Witten, Practice Manager at Binfield Road Surgery
Sharon Sheldon, Head of Digital Transformation (Primary Care) at NHS South East London ICB
Patience Makunike, Senior Business Analyst at NHS South East London ICB
Dr Lydia van Hamel-Parsons, NHS GP and Founding Clinician at Healthtech-1
Rosie Baker, ICB Specialist at Healthtech-1
Matthew Payne, Catalyst at Healthtech-1
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Contact
If you'd like to learn more about automation at scale for your ICB, contact rosie@healthtech1.uk and matthew@healthtech1.uk.
For press enquiries, please contact press@healthtech1.uk and find more in our Press Kit.
Made with 💙 in Stratford, East London.
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Copyright ©2024 Healthtech-1 Ltd. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 in Stratford, East London.
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Copyright ©2024 Healthtech-1 Ltd. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 in Stratford, East London.
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Copyright ©2024 Healthtech-1 Ltd. All rights reserved.