Demand for urgent and same-day care is rising as the population ages and more people live with multiple long-term conditions. Yet when patients contact their GP practice needing to be seen that day, the systems used to assess them rely almost entirely on the symptoms they describe in that moment. The fuller picture – existing conditions, medications, previous admissions – sits in their medical records, invisible to the triage process.
This gap has consequences for patients. Two patients reporting the same symptoms may need very different responses, and the information that distinguishes them is held by the NHS but not used at the point it could make the most difference.
Now, a team led by Catherine Pope, Professor of Medical Sociology at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, working with industry partner Visiba Group, has received £709,630 from the NIHR Invention for Innovation programme to test a system designed to fill in those details.
The project – Intelligent Navigation using AI to bust waiting times for urgent healthcare (INA) – will evaluate whether combining artificial intelligence with patients' medical histories can help clinical teams identify and prioritise the most urgent cases faster than current systems allow.
Read the full story on the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Science website.