Tech Transformation: Kat James’s Journey from Atos to Telemedicine Innovation

How are you improving communication services?

We’re formalising, speeding up and scaling what doctors naturally like to do and always have done: Discuss a patient case with another colleague/specialist when they have exhausted all options within their remit. Previously, GPs and paramedics would have to go through hospital switchboards to get specialist advice, which could take hours or even days which then often meant they would not be able to do it and would have to revert back to sending patients to A&E or refer onto hospital lists with long waits.

Our solution is simple yet powerful. Our app allows GPs and paramedics to connect with available consultants within under 30 seconds. This means clinicians get the advice they need straight away and ensure their patients get sent to the right place first time. Our app is designed to handle both urgent and non-urgent cases seamlessly, allowing for a more flexible and responsive healthcare system. 

Not only do these interactions improve the lives of patients in terms of their physical and mental wellbeing, but also the lives of NHS staff by relieving the pressures and burdens of the waiting lists.

What challenges do you face and how do you manage them?

When you have one customer, the NHS and that customer employs 1.5m people, you are not short of challenges. 

Firstly, effective communication with prospects and users. Doctors in the NHS are overworked and tired and the last thing they might want to learn about is a new initiative when their workload is already unmanageable. We have a large, dedicated team of account specialists that get new users started, and once word spreads that this is one of the easier initiatives, we scale fast. Good communication plans are key to any rollouts. 

We face the same challenges when reaching new decision-makers in the NHS. We’re working across primary care and secondary care boundaries and need to engage with a variety of stakeholders to get buy-in for a project. To-the-point campaigns are key. Selling to the NHS is a long game, not comparable to the faster sales cycles that I was used to in previous industries I worked in. 

Secondly, provide evidence through the right data points, namely, knowing and deciding which data to capture. Most, if not all, health tech tools capture rich data, but which data are meaningful to the project and help stakeholders to make the right decisions? We tailor the data we capture to the needs of a specific project, and our analytics manager is here to support areas in understanding their own data, which in return informs pathway efficiencies. 

Our project in Warwickshire, for example, connects paramedics and GPs directly to local hospital consultants who assess the needs of patients over 75 and whether sending them to hospital is really the best thing to do. In the last 12 months, more than 1,400 calls have been placed through our app and around 50% of these resulted in the patients being treated at home instead of being sent to hospital. 

Finally, keep adjusting. There is no off-the shelf digital product for the NHS. You need to be prepared to be flexible and adjust your offering when you face barriers. One of the early challenges we faced was the capacities to deliver good answer rates when GPs tried to connect with specialists. Less than two years after launching our first project we set up our own network of clinicians to help areas facing capacity challenges when manning their phones and messaging services. When a GP or paramedic uses our app and a local hospital clinician is not available, the call can be routed to our National Network of NHS consultants, to make sure the caller gets through to a specialist for the majority of calls. It was probably one of the most impactful pivots we have done.