Add us as a preferred source
Gary Day, director of public sector at Apogee Corporation, writes that if lost time can be made visible, the barriers causing it can be removed.
The idea that the NHS lacks the technology it needs to perform is old news.
The service is being asked to digitise faster and adopt artificial intelligence in order to increase productivity and deliver the best patient care. NHS England is accelerating the rollout of AI triage through the NHS App, while more than half a million clinicians and support staff are being given access to AI productivity tools. There is a clear push to turn the service’s recent technology investment into usable capacity.
That ambition is both necessary and welcome. But before trusts make the next major technology investment, they need to answer a more basic question: how well do their existing systems work for the practitioners who use them every day?
For many trusts, that remains difficult to determine. Without a clear view of where technology slows work down, investment risks adding complexity to problems that are not yet fully understood.
The missing operational baseline
If a trust cannot see how long staff wait to access systems or where information stops flowing, it cannot confidently decide what to fix first. Without the proper context, it can become impossible to assess whether a new platform has improved anything at all.
Operational visibility must therefore be the starting point for digital transformation, connecting technology performance to staff time, workflow and, ultimately, patient care.
Apogee’s FOI research shows how wide this gap remains. Among responding trusts, 85% did not report using proactive or digital experience monitoring tools. Two-thirds could not confirm how long it takes a typical user to access their systems, while 59% could not say how many employees had access to a designated workstation.
Given that this data is taken directly from participating trusts, it raises serious concerns as to whether staff can begin work quickly and reliably. Slow logins, unavailable devices and routine workarounds can become normalised as everyday irritants rather than recognised as measurable losses of capacity.
The same problem becomes more serious when systems fail outright.
The research found that 28% of responding trusts could not confirm how many IT outages they had experienced, while 40% could not say how long clinically significant outages had lasted.
Among those able to provide data, trusts reported more than 1.1 million device-related incidents, over 360,000 wider IT incidents and more than 13,000 cumulative hours of downtime in a single year.
For staff, the impact is felt in the accumulation of small delays. A slow login can postpone the start of a clinic; an unavailable device can force colleagues to share equipment; an outage can interrupt access to the information needed to make decisions.
None of these problems exists in isolation. Repeated across teams, shifts and sites, they reduce the amount of usable time available for care and create additional work. The time that staff spend repeating tasks or finding temporary workarounds has a huge impact at scale, absorbing time that could otherwise be directed towards patient care.
Communication breakdown
The importance of visibility is now being recognised at a national level. NHS England has introduced new patient-experience standards after acknowledging cases in which invitations arrived only after appointments had already been missed. Trusts will also be expected to report publicly on their progress.
Our data found that responding trusts reported around five million missed or unattended appointments in a single year — yet fewer than 5% could confirm whether communication failures had contributed.
That does not mean poor communication caused every missed appointment. But it does tell us that most trusts lack the evidence needed to understand when messages are delayed, overlooked or sent through ineffective channels. Without that insight, valuable capacity can be lost without a clear route to improvement.
This is why the next phase of NHS digitisation cannot be defined by the introduction of new technology alone.
Turning visibility into better care
Before adding another platform or AI capability, trusts need a clear baseline of how work happens today: where staff lose time, which processes create unnecessary steps and how reliably information moves between teams. From there, leaders can prioritise changes using evidence, monitor the frontline digital experience and measure whether an intervention has genuinely improved access, flow or patient care.
Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals offer a practical example. By simplifying processes and improving how information moved across systems and teams, the trust reduced duplication and released time into frontline activity. It demonstrates that even relatively simple changes can create value when they remove friction from work rather than add another layer to it.
Reaching that point requires trusts to understand current performance before committing to the next major investment. By measuring where friction occurs, linking technology performance to frontline outcomes and testing whether change delivers a genuine improvement, leaders can turn digital ambition into usable capacity.
NHS digitisation should ultimately be judged by a simple test: does it make work easier and return more time to patient care?
That is the principle behind Apogee’s research. If lost time can be made visible, the barriers causing it removed, and the resulting capacity reinvested where it matters most, the health service will be better equipped to turn digital investment into better care.
