Patient Operations Modernization

Referral letters from NHS e-RS, GP email, and paper channels are ingested through a unified intake layer. Document AI extracts clinical priority indicators and patient details to support consistent, structured triage.

• Azure Form Recognizer or AWS Textract processes incoming referral letters. Extracted fields mapped to the organisation's triage criteria. Structured triage objects routed to specialty queues without manual data entry by admin staff.

An AI layer surfaces relevant clinical context from the referral — presenting indicators against the specialty's prioritisation criteria — to support faster, more consistent triage decisions by the clinical team.

• NLP layer identifies clinical priority signals from unstructured referral letter text. Structured output presented to the triage clinician alongside the original letter. Clinician retains full authority over triage decision — AI is a decision-support tool, not an autonomous triage system.

Accepted referrals trigger a structured digital patient pathway — sending automated, personalised communications via SMS and email at each stage (referral accepted, appointment offered, appointment confirmed, pre-appointment guidance).

• Patient communication preferences captured at registration (NHS AIS compliant). Automated messages sent via a clinical communication platform with GPT-4o personalisation for tone and clarity. All communications logged to the patient record.

Patients receive a secure link to confirm or reschedule appointments through a digital self-service interface, reducing inbound call volume for appointment-related enquiries.

• Online booking interface integrates with the EPR scheduling module. Confirmation and reminder messages sent automatically. Cancellation and rescheduling requests processed without admin involvement for standard appointment types.

Operational dashboards provide specialty leads and directorate managers with real-time visibility into referral queue depth, wait time by priority band, capacity utilisation, and RTT trajectory.

• Near-real-time dashboard built on Redshift or Azure Synapse, fed from EPR event data via an integration layer. RTT calculator updated continuously against NHS rules. Directorate-level and trust-wide views with drill-down to specialty and clinician level.

Every triage decision, patient communication, appointment event, and pathway milestone is logged with timestamp, actor identity, and data source — providing a complete audit trail for CQC inspection and ICO data access requests.

• Immutable event log with field-level change tracking. Audit export produces a structured chronological patient pathway record. DSAR response time reduced by automated extraction of patient data trail from the event log.