It’s been another tough year for the NHS, and staff have been working flat out under very challenging conditions. We continue to feel privileged to be able to support them.
This year at Accurx, we’ve continued on our mission to connect everyone involved in a patient’s care. But in early 2023, we realised that we wouldn’t be able to break the silos in the health system if we were recreating them internally, splitting the organisation in ‘GP’ and ‘Trusts’. While care settings differ in terms of context, we’ve found users' needs and underlying communication challenges are broadly the same, right across the system. We therefore spent the summer reorganising our teams to reflect this. This means rather than features like reporting, floreys and compose being one-off projects that have to be prioritised, we have a permanent team on each one. We strongly believe by shifting our structure we’ll be able to deliver a lot more value to our users and the NHS next year and into the future.
Back to 2023… Here's a recap of the highlights.
In primary care…
- We’ve helped hundreds of GP surgeries to adopt a total triage model, meaning they can drastically improve the management of inbound demand, to enable better access for patients. Read more about this here.
- We ran our first ever hackathon with users, which led to us collaborating on materials to help practices adopt a total triage model. We also kick started an ambassador scheme to encourage peer to peer learning on total triage, through which 45 practices have been trained so far.
- We launched new appointment booking features to help GP surgeries more easily manage appointment booking for patients and save time. Our Self-Book feature was found to have the potential to release £123 million to primary care over five years, if scaled nationally.
- We launched Accumail nationally to primary care users, to help GPs communicate more easily with other healthcare providers.
- We integrated batch messaging into the NHS App, allowing practices to send the same text message to a large group of patients, and supporting practices to send out patient questionnaires. This was made available for over 51 million patients across nearly 80% of GP practices.
In secondary care…
- Together with University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, we’ve removed over 21,000 patients (and counting) from the RTT and follow up waiting lists, moved 5,000 patients onto a digital PIFU pathway, freed up clinical time and appointment capacity.
- We started a pilot with Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust to identify complexity early on in the elective surgical pathway, helping to minimise surgery cancellations.
- George Eliot Hospital signed a Trust-wide partnership with us, to tackle elective recovery and outpatient transformation, including waiting list validation across all services and transforming cancer pathways.
- We acquired Induction Switch, the most widely-adopted healthcare communications app in NHS hospitals, as part of our mission to integrate NHS communications.
- We’ve experienced a 45% year-on-year increase in users in hospital trusts in 2023, demonstrating the impact our solutions are having on their workflows
So what does 2024 look like for Accurx and the health system?
Next year will see us continuing to take strong steps to achieve our vision that everyone involved in a patient’s care can communicate with each other.
In 2024 we want to drive a shift in ways of working across the system, to truly support integrated care, improve access for patients across the system, tackle elective recovery and achieve transformative outcomes for patients and staff. This isn’t just about providing staff with tech that works, but about improving legacy models of care delivery too.
We’re excited to do this hand in hand with our users and everyone working in healthcare. Their continued feedback, willingness to let us learn from them and readiness to try new things is what enables us to build products that continually support their working days. For that, we are very grateful.