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Marianne Betts, chief executive officer of Civiteq, writes that automation earns its place when improvements become part of day-to-day care.
Healthcare has no shortage of digital ambition. What it lacks, in many places, is spare capacity.
Teams are being asked to meet rising demand while budgets remain tight, yet skilled time is still lost to administration, duplicated work, and the effort involved in getting information from one part of the system to another. For clinicians, this can mean less time with patients. For patients, it can mean longer waits.
Used well, automation has an important role to play. It can take repetitive work away from staff, help patients reach services more quickly and make better use of resources that are already stretched. We should be ambitious about those opportunities, but just as demanding about what happens after the technology arrives.
Processing more activity is not enough. If the surrounding service remains slow or difficult to use, healthcare has automated something without necessarily improving it.
For leaders deciding where to invest, it is an important distinction. There is rarely enough money, time or workforce capacity to pursue every opportunity at once. The starting point should be the pressure within the service and what is causing it, rather than the technology available to address it. This means prioritising changes that remove the biggest bottlenecks, releasing valuable staff time and improving care. One of the most expensive mistakes is to invest in technology that tackles the most visible symptom while leaving the real constraint untouched.
Find where capacity is really being lost
Look at a service from beginning to end, and the causes of pressure are often less obvious than they first appear. A referral may pass through several hands before anybody can act on it. Staff might enter information that already exists elsewhere because their system cannot see it. A digital route may make the first contact easier, only for somebody further along the process to pick up additional work as a result.
Following the work through in this way helps leaders see where intervention will genuinely remove pressure and where it may simply move the problem elsewhere.
There is a temptation to take an existing process, replace its manual stages with technology and call that transformation. Sometimes the process itself is the problem. Steps may have survived because an old system required them or because teams created workarounds to keep a service moving. Replicating those arrangements digitally can make them harder to remove later.
Frontline staff are invaluable here. They know where people wait, which tasks create avoidable work and what happens when a process breaks down. Their experience should shape the process before decisions are made about the technology that will support it. That helps leaders remove administration that serves little purpose while protecting the time staff need to use their judgement, expertise and empathy with patients.
The risks of focusing on one measure of efficiency can be seen in the recent experience of patients using an AI receptionist in Rotherham. Reports described patients struggling to make themselves understood by the system, with some abandoning the call or visiting their practice instead. The technology was intended to answer calls instantly and remove telephone queues, but an instantly answered call is of little value to a patient who still cannot access the care they need.
AI reception may still have a useful role, but its success needs to be judged across the whole service, not simply by whether one step has become quicker.
That end-to-end view is just as important when healthcare organisations consider how information moves between services and systems. NHS England says effective services depend on staff and patients having access to the right data at the right time, with interoperable systems allowing information to move across health and care settings.
Interoperability is often discussed as an IT concern, yet its day-to-day effect can be measured in staff time. A clinician searching several systems for information that already exists is using capacity the service cannot easily spare. When information does not move with the patient, people may have to repeat their history, and assessments can be duplicated. Care can become less coordinated because the professionals involved are working with different parts of the picture.
Better connected information will not solve every pressure in healthcare, but it can remove some of the friction that staff have learned to work around. The aim is for services to work around the person, with relevant information available to the professionals supporting them rather than trapped within organisational or system boundaries. Removing that friction can release staff time while also making care easier to coordinate.
Making the change is only half the job. Leaders then need to establish whether the expected benefits have already appeared.
Make the benefit visible
Healthcare organisations need to decide what success will look like before implementation starts, rather than work it out once the new system is already in place.
If an investment is meant to release staff time, establish where that time is being spent now and what staff should be able to do differently afterwards. Where better access is the goal, look beyond how quickly a channel answers and examine whether people actually reach the service they need, including whether they have to make contact again.
The same care is needed when productivity is measured. Moving more transactions through a system may look impressive on a dashboard, but it tells leaders little if teams further along the service are receiving incomplete information or dealing with additional work. Financial benefits need to be traced with similar discipline. A saving in the business case is only useful once the organisation can see how and where it has been realised.
Patient experience and outcomes also need evidence of their own. Operational measures can confirm that a transaction was completed; they are less good at revealing how much effort somebody had to expend to complete it. Repeat contacts and abandoned interactions can tell leaders something that throughput figures cannot. Leaders should also consider whether patients are receiving more timely, coordinated care, rather than simply a faster response.
These measures give leaders a much clearer view of whether the promised benefit is actually appearing in the service. Benefits realisation cannot be left until the end of a programme. It should influence what gets funded, how the service is redesigned and what leaders pay attention to once a system is live.
That evidence should also inform future investment decisions. If automation has genuinely released capacity, improved access or allowed staff to use more of their time on valuable work, there is evidence to build on. If the expected benefit has not appeared, adding another layer of technology is unlikely to fix the underlying problem.
Healthcare cannot afford transformation that is technically successful but leaves the operation largely unchanged. Some of the most valuable improvements may appear quite ordinary: information reaching a professional without somebody having to chase it, a routine request being resolved without an unnecessary handover, repetitive administration disappearing from somebody’s day, or a member of staff having more time for the patient in front of them.
Automation earns its place when improvements like these become part of day-to-day care. Go-live starts the change. The evidence comes afterwards, when leaders can see whether the service genuinely works better for the people delivering and using it.
