Upgrading mission-critical services with AI, without causing disruption

NHS 24 handles around two million urgent care calls each year, with call handlers assessing symptoms, identifying risks, and directing patients to the most appropriate care pathways, such as out-of-hours GP support or A&E.

A recent upgrade saw NHS 24 implement a clinical reasoning engine – an AI-powered support system to help the call handlers for Scotland's 111 service.

On this week's episode of the ITPro Podcast, Bobby and Jane talk to NHS 24 CIO Ann-Marie Gallacher to discuss a complex AI transformation across a service that can't afford downtime, and what lessons IT leaders take from it.

Highlights

"The reasoning engine is pretty unique; it is a powerful tool, the most powerful tool in our armoury. So the decision was, we need to replace everything, together, at the same time, and within a specific time frame."

"There were a few incidents that kinda stopped us in our tracks: global outages. There was Cloudflare – you probably didn't miss it on the TV when airports were shut down and banks; we were in the throes of implementing the technology that our new platform was using..."

Links

• Saving the NHS with tech: Doctors on-demand
• Cloudflare outage explained
• How Dragon Copilot is helping clinicians spend more time with their patients