An inside look at NHS South East London's automation rollout.

LONDON, ENGLAND (December 2024) — Healthtech-1 releases an inside look at the success of an unprecedented automation pilot across NHS South East London ICB. The film reveals how practices are increasing access, powering productivity, and creating capacity across South East London. Watch the film and read the case study here.

Watch the film and read the case study 💙

→ Find out more on the Stories page ←

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

Digital pioneers across primary care share their story 📣

The film features honest reflections from leaders of GP practices and representatives of NHS South East London ICB.

"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

"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

“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

"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 are outstanding ⭐

As of December 2024, 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

A look inside NHS South East London's automation success 👀

You can watch the film and read the case study at www.healthtech1.uk/stories 💙

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.