Project Overview
An NHS Integrated Urgent Care (IUC) provider operating NHS 111 services for a population of 1.8 million people...
Technology Stack
Compliance & Standards
The Challenge
An NHS Integrated Urgent Care (IUC) provider operating NHS 111 services for a population of 1.8 million people (500,000 calls/year) needed to digitise their clinical assessment workflow — reducing call handling time, improving ICD-10 symptom coding, and providing clinicians with real-time NHS Pathways decision support integration. NHS Pathways licence (CDSS — Clinical Decision Support System), DTAC all 5 domains, DCB0129 (urgent care is highest patient safety risk), NHS SDS authentication, UK GDPR Article 9, and WCAG 2.1 AA were mandatory. Budget: £90,000.
Our Approach
NHS Pathways
- CDSS used by all NHS 111 services — structured clinical assessment algorithm (1,500+ pathways) determining care disposition (self-care, primary care, urgent treatment centre, A&
- E, 999).
NHS Pathways API
- ClickMasters integrated the Pathways API (licenced from NHS England) — clinical assessment inputs (symptom description, patient demographics, clinical observations) → Pathways API → structured disposition output (care level, time to care, clinical advice).
- Pathways integration eliminates manual pathway navigation — clinician enters structured responses, Pathways engine calculates disposition.
- ICD-10 Symptom Auto-
Coding
- ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision): NHS 111 calls must be coded for national statistics reporting.
- Auto-coding: call summary (structured text) → NLP model → ICD-10 code suggestion (top 3 suggestions with confidence scores).
Clinician validation
clinician selects correct ICD-10 code from suggestions — no automated final coding without clinical sign-off.
Model training
42,000 anonymised NHS 111 call summaries (HRA ethics approval) → BioBERT fine-tuned for NHS 111 ICD-10 coding task.
Coding accuracy
88% top-1 match (clinician accepts first suggestion).
Highest hazard
NHS Pathways API downtime during call causing delay to safety-netting.
Mitigation
NHS Pathways API multi-region redundancy, local Pathways cache (last-known pathway state if API unavailable), and documented fallback protocol (paper pathway card available at every clinical workstation).
Second hazard
ICD-10 auto-coding error causing incorrect statistics.
Mitigation
- ICD-10 coding is never patient-facing — statistics only — clinician always validates.
- Real-
NHS Urgent and Emergency Care capacity
- ClickMasters integrated with the NHS UEC Capacity Management system — real-time bed availability, waiting times at UTC/A&
- E, and GP in-hours/out-of-hours availability.
Disposition optimisation
- if UTC waiting time >
- 4 hours, alternative lower-acuity pathway offered where clinically appropriate.
Ambulance dispatch integration
999 disposition triggers CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) pre-alert to ambulance trust.
The Results
DTAC approved all 5 domains.
Platform live at 16 weeks, £82,000 — under budget.
Call handling time: 8.4 minutes → 6.2 minutes average (26% reduction).
ICD-10 coding accuracy: 88% top-1 suggestion accepted.
NHS Pathways dispositions reviewed by clinical governance: 99.2% concordance with expected dispositions.
WCAG 2.1 AA: zero non-compliances.
IUC provider selected for NHS England digital exemplar programme based on platform performance.
“26% call handling time reduction at 500,000 calls per year — that is 110,000 minutes of capacity released annually. ICD-10 auto-coding 88% accuracy reduces a task that clinicians disliked. 99.2% Pathways disposition concordance in clinical governance review. NHS England digital exemplar selection was the external validation of the platform's quality." — Medical Director, NHS IUC Provider (name withheld)”
Project Details
Related Case Studies
View AllGovTech Service — Local Council Digital Transformation
GovTech Service — Local Council Digital Transformation. A UK local council needed to digitise three resident-facing services: planning application status tracking, council tax ...
GovTech API Integration — HMRC Making Tax Digital for Accountancy SaaS
A UK accountancy software startup needed to integrate with HMRC Making Tax Digital (MTD) for VAT as a software...
Open Data Platform — UK Local Government Digital Transformation
A consortium of three UK local authorities needed to build an open data platform to publish public sector data...
Ready to Transform Your Business?
Let's discuss how our technical expertise can help you achieve remarkable results.