Medway NHS builds AI-powered contact solution to improve patient experience and resource use

Medway NHS Foundation Trust, located in Kent, operates the Medway Maritime Hospital. The hospital wanted to improve care in the region and adapt resource use to deliver care more efficiently. It engaged with PwC to improve the client-facing experience, focusing on the contact centre touchpoints that patients had. Calls into its contact centre faced an average wait time for service of 16 minutes. This resulted in a 46% abandonment rate—meaning callers disconnected without getting the help they needed. A new contact system was developed, tested and deployed in just five months from start to finish and has dramatically improved the patient experience.

The Medway Maritime Hospital is faced with the persistent challenge of delivering quality health services efficiently. One way it does this is by ensuring that physicians, nurses and other health professionals are scheduled effectively. Medway NHS Trust found that a major reason for scheduling problems was that patients could not reach its call centre to confirm, reschedule or cancel appointments. When patients don’t turn up for an appointment, the provider’s time is lost forever from the system.

The call centre was operating on a system that simply placed callers in a queue where they would wait to be served by an available agent. In addition to the long wait times and high abandonment rate, the limited hours of the contact centre meant that patients were frustrated and, in many cases, weren’t able to arrive for scheduled appointments.

The knock-on effect of this was that when patients didn’t turn up for appointments, clinicians, who could have been seeing other patients, were not providing care to the public. “It was shocking to find that nearly half of our patients couldn’t reach us,” says Nick Sinclair, Chief Operating Officer at Medway NHS Trust. “It impacted our ability to deliver care and left patients feeling neglected. We knew this had to change.”

Medway NHS Trust approached us to discuss what could be done to improve the contact centre experience for patients. After discussing the pain points and realising Medway NHS Trust’s appetite for innovation, we decided to create a unified contact solution.

The inability of patients to self-serve or call in to perform any function outside of the limited working hours was identified as the root cause of abandoned calls and missed appointments that left healthcare professionals without patients to care for. The new solution needed to automate elements of patient contact so that a digitally enabled population could use self-service for their hospital visits in a way that they do in other aspects of their day-to-day life. By enabling self-service where it was appropriate, it would be possible to improve the service to the remainder of the calls that needed more human contact to resolve.

Amazon Connect, an AI-native contact centre from Amazon Web Services (AWS), is the basis of the new system. Using Amazon Lex chatbots—which can connect with other AWS services to query data and execute business logic—and automated options were developed that allow callers to resolve their needs on their own schedule and without a lengthy wait. But Medway NHS Trust wanted more than a chatbot self-serve option. It wanted to ensure that those conducting voice calls had an improved experience as well.

Using Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex and the large language AI models available on Amazon Bedrock, we were able to tie the contact centre tools to backend systems. AI was used to better understand what patients are asking and match that to the appropriate outcome. This helps route patients to someone who can help them with greater speed and accuracy. Before the new system, 50% of calls were misdirected.

The system runs on AWS Lambda serverless technology. This means that Medway NHS Trust pays only for the resources it needs, when it needs them, delivering cost savings over the previous way of working.

PwC, Medway NHS Trust and AWS were able to quickly develop a proof-of-concept system for testing in just six weeks, a significant achievement for a task of this nature. Because the system would be connected to NHS systems and draw on patient information to streamline scheduling, it was important to thoroughly test the system’s functionality and its security. Even with this level of care required, the development progressed rapidly for a project of this scope, taking only five months from initial conversation until going live.

Medway NHS Trust launched its innovative new solution and almost immediately saw improvement in both the way callers were served and the use of its resources.

The average 16-minute wait time for callers was cut to zero as the system picks up every call as soon as it is received. From there, callers have the option for self-service—which about 30% use—or to interact further to be quickly routed to someone who can help them. Abandonment rates dropped by 50%. These results have represented a significant improvement for Medway NHS Trust.

Because patients can make enquiries about their appointments and change or cancel them as needed, Medway NHS Trust has also seen a decrease of 3% in appointment no-shows. That might seem a small number, but it means that healthcare providers can be scheduled more efficiently and that patients can get care faster as they can fill appointments that come open due to changes or cancellations. Medway NHS Trust has calculated that the new system has also saved patients tens of thousands of minutes that they would have otherwise been spent trying to get service.

“You’ll never be able to automate everything,” says Sinclair. “That shouldn’t be the goal. We’ve identified and automated that which will give benefits to both patients and the hospital. This frees up clinicians and admin to spend needed time with patients. It’s been a huge success for us and is just the beginning.”

As this was the first project of its type for Medway NHS Trust, it had to take care to develop, test and deploy its solution. It now has an operational system that demonstrates that a unified contact solution can work in an NHS hospital, although every case is unique. Now that it has resolved pain points with the customer-facing contact centre, Medway NHS Trust will continue to work with us on ways it can use AWS to improve other processes, such as proactively engaging with the waitlist, making it easier for patients to enquire about cancer treatment referrals and giving patients more control over cancelling or rescheduling appointments.