At this very moment in time, millions of people will be ringing up their local GP desperately trying to get an appointment.
But for Joan Downing, a patient in Doncaster, she’s having a completely different experience.
Since October, Joan is one of many patients who is engaging with an AI receptionist – rather than a real-life person – at the Conisbrough Group Practice in Doncaster.
The ‘virtual receptionist’, known as EMMA, which stands for ‘Enhanced Medical Management Assistant’, now picks up the phone for Joan as well as 1,000,000 other GP patients.
The phone system, created by the AI start-up QuantumLoopAI, records patient details, prioritises their requests and signposts them to GPs.
For Joan, who cares for her brother with complex medical needs, it’s been a huge time saver.
‘Sometimes I’d put the phone down as I was in the queue for so long, it seemed like I’d never be number one,’ the 70-year-old told Metro.
‘But since they’ve rolled out Emma, it’s been so much quicker. I once had a call back within 15 minutes, which is off the scale.’
Only four in 10 patients see their GP on the day
Medical care in the UK has become a waiting game – waiting hours for ambulances, days for GP appointments and years for surgeries.
Family doctors are increasingly leaning on technology, such as digital hotlines, to help see patients.
Now, such tech includes AI, which is plugging the gaps of GP services buckling under growing pressure – for better or for worse.
Joan said the first time she used EMMA was in October, when her brother was suffering from fluid build-up in his legs.
Within the hour, Joan said, her GP sent a paramedic to treat her brother’s symptoms – a side effect of his medication, Joan was told.
‘As a senior, technology can be scary,’ Joan said, ‘I’m not used to robots. I just want to go to the doctor. After my experience with EMMA, if this is the future, then it’s all going to be exceptional.’
Many GP surgeries open their phone lines at 8am, meaning patients requiring an on-the-day appointment have to phone on the dot.
This leads to the ‘8am rush’, where phone lines are jammed with calls. Patients say they are held in long queues only to be told all the appointments have been booked up.
Not every doctor’s office works like this, with some offering online bookings or phone call-back service
But only four in 10 patients see their GP on the same day they booked, according to NHS data. As many as one in 10 wait 28 days.
The government said patients should get an appointment with their GP practice within two weeks, and that patients with urgent needs should be seen on the same day.
A single full-time GP is now responsible for an average of 2,236 patients; that’s 299 more than in September 2015.
Imran Khan, the CEO of QuantumLoopAI, tells Metro that EMMA was built with NHS GPs in mind.
‘Crucially, EMMA isn’t just another phone assistant,’ Khan said. ‘She’s the first intelligent call-handling system that has been built over a period of two years with input and feedback from real reception teams and clinicians.’
Bex Cottey, a business manager at Joan’s GP, said the practice turned to EMMA after a receptionist left.
Receptionists, Cottey said, ‘receive the best and the worst from our patients daily’, and she struggled to hire a replacement.
On a typical Monday for the clinic of 12,000 patients, four of the clinic’s six staff members would need to be answering phones.
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Now seemed the right time to check out this so-called ‘virtual receptionist’.
‘We were concerned about creating a further frustrating system akin to calling your bank, where the “bot” can’t understand what you are asking for, or misunderstands and directs you somewhere you don’t want to be,’ Cottey recalls.
‘But the demo seemed much more sophisticated, and natural; and we had no other satisfactory solutions to the workload.’
The GP office trialled EMMA, having it on the other end of the line about one hour a week, while medical chiefs reviewed what it told patients.
Without needing to be on the phones all day, Cottey said staff have had more time to upskill to carry out higher patient care.
‘The staff report a greater sense of job satisfaction and no longer dread receiving abuse from angry patients who’ve been waiting in a phone queue for too long,’ she adds.
‘Robot EMMA is the wrong answer to an artificial problem’
Dr Becks Fisher, a research and policy director at the health research organisation Nuffield Health, said GPs are facing a ‘wild west’ of AI tools.
Doctors are being offered AI-powered note-takers and software that can analyse online requests. Some have embraced them, others have not.
And none are being regulated by the NHS, Dr Fisher, a GP, tells Metro.
‘This could be yet another way that health inequalities are being baked in, precisely when the government aims to reduce disparities in general practice,’ she adds.
Many doctors’ offices are facing rising demand and struggle to recruit and retain staff. If they’re even still open: 1,442 have closed since 2015.
Nearly 64 million patients are registered with GP practices in England, up 7.04 million since 2015.
Cat Hobbs, the director of the campaign group We Own It, however, said the fact that GP services are turning to AI to get by is not a good sign.
‘Robot EMMA is the wrong answer to an artificially created problem,’ Hobbs said.
‘The dystopian endpoint is that you turn up sick or struggling at your GP surgery and there’s no human there to help you.
‘It’s a really scary direction to go in.’
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