Efficiency – PRO-MAPP

Our AI impact: waiting list monitoring and management

Posted on March 28, 2025April 3, 2025 by Michael Phillips

This is the first in a series of blogs around PRO-MAPP’s (and the wider healthcare industry’s) actionable uses of AI. You can find the introductory background article here.

Where waiting list management has halted

Most of us have been patients in the hospital waiting room. Whether sitting directly in the lounge for emergency services or being in the backlog for a more intense planned operation, a lot of us unfortunately have tales to tell about waiting times. Some can be horror stories.

In the UK, the National Health Service has carried a huge load; a mountain of intensive human and material resource usage on both critical and non-critical patients. The average GP surgery has more than 2000 registered patients, where any tailored assessments have to account for tests, evaluations, hospital space, and rehabilitation. Orthopaedics are commonly slow due to infamous multiple assessments for a patient’s surgery validity, implant costs and staff training. So much so that the speciality comprises the nation’s longests lists. Hip and knee replacement costs 1.5% of the NHS’ entire budget. There’s also spinal surgery or life-altering trauma cases to think about.

Restricting waiting list bottlenecks and ensuring every urgent matter gets prioritised calls for operational efficiency in triage – basing assessment or event treatment on how urgent a matter is. This has a positive domino effect on secondary or tertiary care freeing up resources for trauma and orthopaedic surgery. Understanding what their issue or condition is, where they should go and who they should see takes time to guarantee that every need is met. Managing such a data-heavy task is where artificial intelligence tools can step in.

Gaining assessments in real-time

Monitoring patients takes into account their health records, past surgeries or assessments, tests, need for surgery, and ideal pathways (what preferred service they expect during their health journey). It’s not that hospitals do not have this data to hand, but legacy technology has been tough to maintain – growing monolithic structures that lose or silo patient data, and misallocate resources or operational plans to staff. There are also inconsistencies between referrals at regional practices, as outlined by the NHS’ Getting It Right First Time initiative.

Managing these queues becomes unfocused and assessing-low risk cases amasses delays that can have a drastic effect on patients: seeking private service, skipping care altogether, depending on opiates to deal with pain, and perhaps worsening their symptoms.

One true supportive behaviour of AI is its swift data-gathering techniques. Any inputs – including patient questionnaires or assessment or surgery notes – can be collated immediately into digitised databases that are simple to find, amend and share. This can flag critical patients to ensure they’re fast-tracked through workflows that can be easily communicated to both clinicians, support staff and patients themselves. In that regard, AI’s unification of data not only supports risk assessment for triage, but boosts satisfaction in exemplary patient outcomes.

AI-driven waiting list monitoring and management has already reaped rewards in making data-backed decisions in a fraction of human time. In Scotland in 2019, automated AI triage was compared to clinician’s valued opinion on referrals for gastroenterology with positive results, including facilitated communication between primary and secondary care. AI triage has also seen a 77.1% acceptance rate among researched medical staff in China.

In trauma cases where fractures or other serious injuries require immediate surgery, these reactive demands require AI to surface pathway data for smooth scheduling and resource allocation for planned elective surgery, even at short notice.

PRO-MAPP’s AI journey

GIRFT is prioritising standardisation as a way to halt unnecessary delays, where integrating this technology on a nationwide scale lies with healthcare providers supported by AI automations, including here at PRO-MAPP:

The platform utilises AI for digital scheduling; collating results from patient intake forms to craft an assessment system for nursing staff to coordinate paths for surgery.
AI underlines automated patient-reported outcomes, satisfaction surveys, and operative data reporting without the need for dictation.
Assessment for surgical readiness can be decreased from around half an hour to 5 minutes, where operative reports can be billed on the same day as service.
Through waiting list monitoring and management, we target to reduce lengths of stay for prehabilitation, as well as wasted secondary care appointments, looking to save the NHS over £1.5 million and counting.

Speeding up triage through digital AI tools is not just down to switching telephone questionnaires to online consultations through apps. It’s about putting data input into the patients’ hands, removing the need for unnecessary in-person checks with doctors and prioritising critical patients for surgery or rehabilitation.

Waiting lists are the major operational dilemmas for the NHS – where AI’s help revolves around identifying critical clients and reducing resources of staff costs that take away from efficient orthopaedic surgeries. When those are saved, staff training classes and patient accommodations can be met more suitably which, when rolled out to other institutions, can standardise data collection and usage and reduce the burden of queues all around the nation.

Next in the series, we’ll be delving into AI’s personalisation capabilities to streamline patient pathways. If you’d like to know more about how AI drives our waiting list monitoring and management, contact us today!

Standardising workflows and ‘Getting It Right First Time’: an overview of GIRFT

Posted on November 4, 2024March 28, 2025 by Michael Phillips

Backed by a range of Royal Colleges and professional associations, the Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) initiative is part of a suite of programmes developed by NHS England. Bringing together powerful data analysis and reviews, it aims to enable healthcare services to improve patient care and pathways across the nation.

Let’s dive in to learn more about its origins, plans, and performance up to this point, as well as looking ahead to its potential future.

GIRFT’s original aims

GIRFT was originally conceived as a pilot methodology for reviewing orthopaedic surgery specialties by Professor Tim Briggs, with its landmark 2015 report coining the term. The research was hosted by the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital NHS Trust (RNOH) and funded by NHS England. After his team covered more than 140 providers in over 200 hospitals, the subsequent programme (as we know it now) was launched in 2016.

The scheme aims to achieve standardisation for delivering quality patient care across NHS healthcare facilities. Often, clinical practice from site to site can differ greatly, affecting the efficiency of teams, their use of crucial resources, and the level of service they can deliver for patients already experiencing lengthy waiting times for orthopaedic assessments and surgeries.

GIRFT’s greater impact can be felt following the pandemic – a catastrophic incident for patients and NHS staff that faced a battleground each day. Covid-19’s ripple effect has unfortunately seen long physical queues for appointments, but GIRFT’s strategy places staff wellbeing and satisfaction as a high priority, acknowledging the dedication and mental health of key roles at NHS hospitals.

How does it work?

1.Making the most of data

To outline any discrepancies in operations across the country, GIRFT gathers and analyses national data in line with the methodology’s own benchmarking framework. Different arms of the NHS can compare their performance data against both regional or national standards; this allows them to gain empirical metric-backed evidence to inform the effectiveness of their clinical practice in adhering to patients.

2.Teamwork

Using the combined expertise and support of clinicians and management teams at various NHS trusts, the GIRFT’s recommendations can be put into practice and reiterated to determine the actionable, physical changes to healthcare services beyond the data insights. By encouraging meetings among practitioners, as well as data-gathering exercises and continuous learning, this hopes to rollout more standardised patient pathways no longer marred by diminishing variations. This alliance can contribute to the continual improvement of using GIRFT’s findings to foster better outcomes not just at one institution, but many.

3.Strategic plans

Designated ‘enhanced care’ areas have been established to provide flexible support to those requiring post-operative care. The scheme aims to improve patient management for a range of diverse clinical care scenarios, where appropriate and timely intervention can be applied to meet various degrees of clinical needs.

The results (so far)

The flag posts for better pre-operative assessments include reduced repeated testing, the removal of unnecessary face-to-face appointments, and fast-tracking high risk patients that urgently need to be seen by medical professionals. Plus, when resources and staff hours are implemented accordingly for the right tasks, it can have dramatic cost impacts for an NHS that is unfortunately facing financial burden.

Initial findings have seen that, particularly within orthopaedics, hospital trusts that have used GIRST’s assessments have saved outgoings ranging between £20 million to £30 million.

With greater uptake and collaboration involving other specialised trusts, these reductions look set to become more widespread for financial sustainability across the UK. In order to cover more surgical disciplines, GIRFT released 18 additional national documents in 2024 to analyse current procedures, and recommend improvements to deliver quality treatment to NHS patients.

Looking to the future

The environment for effective patient management has certainly improved through the GIRFT programme, and the post-pandemic era serves as a greater opportunity to be ambitious in getting more NHS trusts on board.

The initiative is constantly evolving as surgeries leverage the national data to hand and cross-collaborate to achieve a more effective ecosystem. With uniform pathways, not only can post-operative operations be smoothed for significant cost reduction, but staff and patient satisfaction can be essentially lifted too, revolutionising the running of a stretched NHS.

PRO-MAPP is pleased to have been chosen in GIRFT’s research as a vendor contributing to optimise patient pathways through our Pre-Assessment Clinic Triage product. Discover the full guide here, and chat to us to learn more about our inclusion.

Success by degrees: how to overhaul inefficient healthcare with Small IT

Posted on July 12, 2024March 28, 2025 by Michael Phillips

In the tricky pursuit for next-generation healthcare technology, the NHS has often found itself entangled in the complexities of ‘Big IT’ programs. For decades, these large-scale nationwide programs, often championed by consulting giants, promised transformation but delivered little more than frustration and inefficiency. The time has come to pivot towards a new, and arguably better, notion: Small IT.

The allure of Big IT solutions, with their expansive scope and proposals of comprehensive integration, once held sway over healthcare decision makers. But bloated budgets, delayed timelines, and systems plagued by interoperability issues have become all too familiar hallmarks of these grand endeavours.

For the NHS, another fundamental flaw of Big IT initiatives lies in their top-down approach. These monolithic projects often attempt to impose standardised solutions across a diverse landscape of healthcare providers, disregarding the bespoke challenges and workflows of individual institutions. This ‘one size fits all’ mentality inevitably leads to adaptation struggles and, ultimately, suboptimal outcomes.

Adjusting to a nimbler evidence-based approach and building from proven localised successes allows for innovators to partner with the so-called integration giants in subsequent phases of rollout. The tail stops wagging the dog. Innovators lead, partnering with scale-out enablers at the right time and only after ROI proof-points have been demonstrated. This is where Small IT comes in.

The ethos of Small IT centres on leveraging modern technology stacks to empower innovators to tailor solutions to the specific needs of healthcare providers and patients alike. It marks a tactical pivot towards agile solutions delivered by passionate teams with a focus on both service and profitability.
Small IT also thrives on collaboration and customisation. By working closely with healthcare stakeholders, operations heads can gain a deep understanding of their needs and pain points, crafting solutions that seamlessly integrate into existing workflows while addressing specific challenges head on. This bottom-up approach fosters a sense of ownership and engagement among end users, driving adoption and ensuring that technology truly enhances, rather than hinders, the delivery of care.

The agility inherent in Small IT allows for rapid iterations according to evolving healthcare requirements and emerging technologies. Rather than being shackled to outdated systems and cumbersome bureaucracies, healthcare organisations can embrace change as an opportunity for growth and improvement. Dynamic responsiveness is crucial in an industry that changes as rapidly as healthcare, where the ability to swiftly respond to new challenges (spikes in patient admissions and evolving ailments, for example) can mark the difference between success and stagnation.

Critics of the Small IT approach may argue that it lacks the scale and robustness of Big IT solutions. But the goal is not to build massive systems that attempt to solve every problem under the sun, rather to create flexible, modular solutions that can be easily modified and scaled as needed. Small IT embraces the concept that solutions can’t do it all, yet are pragmatic, cost-effective, and, most importantly, deliver tangible value to end-users.

Plus the rise of modern tech stacks – cloud computing, microservices architecture, and open-source software – has democratised access to powerful tools and platforms for all Small IT users who can rapidly prototype and deploy solutions with minimal upfront investment. It levels the playing field and empowers a new age of healthcare entrepreneurs.

The era of Big IT dominance in healthcare is coming to an end. Decades of failed initiatives and wasted resources have demonstrated the limitations of top-down, holistic approaches. Software development efficiencies only add to the case. It is time to embrace Small IT’s agility, collaboration and customisation to revolutionise the delivery of care throughout the NHS.

By harnessing the creativity and passion of smaller IT teams, we can finally realise the promise of technology to improve patient outcomes, enhance clinician satisfaction, and drive efficiency throughout the healthcare system: a fundamental change meaningful to us all.

Tag: Efficiency