Patient engagement specialist, Healthcare Communications, part of Webex, has partnered with Deep Medical, the digital health group specialising in artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for medical imaging and diagnostics.
Healthcare Communications will integrate the AI solution into its communications platform to reduce missed appointments, in an effort to improve waiting times and drive down health inequalities.
Following a successful pilot at Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust, which saw the number of did not attends (DNAs) reduce by almost a third in six months, the integration has been rolled out across the entire trust.
This is forecast to allow 100,000-150,000 extra patients to be seen and save the trust £28 million each year.
The results have led to NHS England announcing plans to roll out Deep Medical’s AI solution to a further ten NHS trusts.
Erica White, Programme Director at Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust, said: “The initial pilot outcomes are hugely encouraging.
“It has helped us to make the best use of our resources as a service, reducing no shows and supporting the movement of patients off the waiting list.
“Critical to this is being able communicate with our patients at scale, across multiple channels, and we are delighted to be using the Webex Connect platform through Healthcare Communications to deliver this.
“Our deployment with Deep Medical and Healthcare Communications will be a fantastic example of how harnessing the power of AI, with proactive, scalable communications will play a key role in the NHS’s improvements.”
Missed appointments are a major issue for the NHS. According to NHS England, every year in England, eight million appointments are missed and four million are cancelled at short notice, costing the NHS over £2 billion annually, all while 7.6 million people are waiting for care.
Initial calculations made by Deep Medical suggest if a patient misses just two hospital appointments their risk of death increases by eight times, compared to patients with the same condition who do not miss appointments.
This in turn increases the likelihood of the person requiring more urgent and emergency care, further increasing the pressure on the NHS.
An algorithm is used to predict DNAs based on external insights such as a person’s job, childcare and carer commitments, live traffic, and weather, before offering alternative bookings for patients. This is achieved by analysing hundreds of human behaviour insights from trust data.
Healthcare Communication’s platform, Webex Connect, then uses the segmented data to send hyper-personalised messages to patients through various channels and at different times to give them the best opportunity to be aware of appointments and rearrange to a convenient time and/or date to optimise their attendance likelihood.
Kenny Bloxham, Managing Director at Healthcare Communications, said: “Firstly, I would like to congratulate Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust on its successful implementation.
“As the leading Patient Engagement Platform in the UK, it felt like a natural development to become integration partners with Deep Medical.
“We both share a vision to support the personalised care agenda and make a lasting positive change to patient experiences and waiting lists.
“Combining our capabilities with Deep Medical’s AI insights has the power to transform patient engagement and unlock substantial cost savings and efficiencies.”
The integration is powering a multifaceted approach to pre-empt DNAs by responding to accessibility needs.
Communications in the patient’s first language, translation features and voice reminders are supporting people with language and literacy barriers as well as visual impairments.
Vulnerable and older cohorts facing digital exclusion are also being assisted by clinical team home visits and telephone calls to engage patients in their care and fulfil scheduling needs.
Dr Benyamin Deldar, Deep Medical’s Co-Founder and former NHS Doctor and NIA Fellow, said: “Our partnership with Healthcare Communications represents a pivotal moment in our mission to improve patient care and optimise clinician time.
“It made sense to integrate with a leading patient communications provider such as Healthcare Communications so we could maximise our potential to reduce the waiting list backlog and health inequalities.
“As innovation partners, we have the full capability to make a meaningful impact to the NHS and society in a short period of time.”
Future plans for the partnership are centred on closer interoperability between the Deep Medical platform and Webex Connect, to develop and deploy more use cases, whilst widening the use of other communication channels, including RCS.
