An AI-powered appointment system developed by UK health-tech company DrDoctor could save the NHS up to £300 million a year by dramatically reducing missed hospital appointments, one of the health service's most frequent and expensive problems.
Missed outpatient appointments cost the NHS approximately £1 billion annually, wasting staff time, wasting clinical capacity and lengthening waiting lists. DrDoctor believes its new AI platform, Smart Center, can cut non-attendance rates by about 30% by predicting which patients are unlikely to come and adjusting clinic capacity in advance.
The company was founded in 2012 by Tom Whitcher after he noticed repeated appointment failures while waiting in outpatient departments – patients coming on the wrong day, at the wrong time, or holding on to old letters.
“Up until recently, we were solving parts of the problem with things like reminder texts,” Wisher said. “But we reached a point where we reached extremes. AI has unlocked something that would have been unimaginable five years ago.”
Launching in 2024, the Smart Center uses machine learning to assess the likelihood of a patient attending an appointment. The system analyzes factors including age, deprivation index, past attendance behaviour, demographics and time and day of appointment.
To create the model, DrDoctor trained its system on an anonymized dataset of four billion rows of NHS data, covering 55 million patients and 160 million appointments. A team of ten engineers spent several months cleaning and validating the data before deploying the model.
Development took approximately two years and was supported by a £1 million award from the Department of Health and Social Care, which is repaid through revenue-sharing, with participating NHS organizations receiving discounted access.
The initial results have been shocking. One hospital using the smart center treated an additional 9,000 patients in three months, while another was able to eliminate costly clinics altogether.
If rolled out nationally, DrDoctor estimates this technology could deliver £300 million in annual efficiency savings, while significantly improving patient access to care.
Persuading NHS organizations to change long-established ways of working proved to be as challenging as building the technology. Hospitals had to adapt scheduling processes, retrain administrative staff and ensure patients understood the new approach.
Engineers were added to hospital teams to work with frontline staff to test and refine the system. “Education is just as important as technology,” Whicher said. “Without the trust of staff and patients, it won't work.”
With Smart Centre, DrDoctor has developed an AI voice agent that can handle routine patient queries, manage bookings and provide assistance before and after the appointment.
An early version of the voice system was discontinued because it sounded too robotic. When the team returned to the idea six months ago, advances in AI meant development took a quarter of the time, with the new version introducing regionally accented voices that sound more natural to patients.
“Patients become frustrated when they can't get through on the phone, and hospital staff waste a lot of time dealing with routine questions,” Whitcher said. “AI can handle them brilliantly, freeing people up to focus on more complex matters.”
The company plans to expand the role of voice agents to include medical follow-up questions and recovery assistance, potentially reducing unnecessary return trips to the hospital.
DrDoctor now manages more than 140 million appointments annually for 36 million patients across 70 NHS organisations, covering almost two-thirds of England. Despite reporting revenues of £16 million in 2024, the company is loss-making as it continues to invest heavily in product development and NHS deployment.
With continued pressure on waiting lists and higher productivity on the political agenda, tools promising meaningful efficiency gains are attracting increasing interest. If the early demonstration of smart centers is replicated across the country, AI-powered appointment management could become one of the most effective – and least controversial – digital upgrades of the NHS.
jamie young
Jamie is a senior reporter at Business Matters, with over a decade of experience in UK SME business reporting. Jamie has a degree in Business Administration and regularly attends industry conferences and workshops. When Jamie is not reporting on the latest business developments, he is passionate about mentoring budding journalists and entrepreneurs to inspire the next generation of business leaders.