The AI tool that could save the NHS £300m a year by cutting missed appointments

An AI-powered appointments system developed by UK health-tech company DrDoctor could save the NHS up to £300 million a year by dramatically reducing missed hospital appointments, one of the health service’s most persistent and costly problems.

Missed outpatient appointments cost the NHS close to £1 billion annually, tying up staff time, wasting clinical capacity and lengthening waiting lists. DrDoctor believes its new AI platform, Smart Centre, can cut non-attendance rates by around 30% by predicting which patients are most likely not to turn up and adjusting clinic capacity in advance.

The company was founded in 2012 by Tom Whicher after he observed repeated appointment failures while waiting in outpatient departments — patients arriving on the wrong day, at the wrong time, or clutching outdated letters.

“Until recently, we were solving parts of the problem with things like reminder texts,” Whicher said. “But we reached a point where we hit a ceiling. AI has unlocked something that would have been unimaginable five years ago.”

Launched in 2024, Smart Centre uses machine learning to assess the likelihood of a patient attending an appointment. The system analyses factors including age, deprivation indices, past attendance behaviour, demographics, and the time and day of the appointment.

To build the model, DrDoctor trained its system on an anonymised dataset of four billion rows of NHS data, covering 55 million patients and 160 million appointments. A team of ten engineers spent months cleaning and validating the data before the model was deployed.

Development took around two years and was supported by a £1 million award from the Department of Health and Social Care, which is repaid via revenue-sharing, with participating NHS organisations receiving discounted access.

Early results have been striking. One hospital using Smart Centre treated an additional 9,000 patients over three months, while another was able to eliminate costly out-of-hours clinics altogether.

If rolled out nationally, DrDoctor estimates the technology could unlock £300 million in annual efficiency savings while significantly improving patient access to care.

Convincing NHS organisations to change long-established ways of working proved as challenging as building the technology itself. Hospitals had to adapt scheduling processes, retrain administrative staff and ensure patients understood the new approach.

Engineers were embedded within hospital teams to test and refine the system, working alongside frontline staff. “Education is as important as the technology,” Whicher said. “Without staff and patients trusting it, it simply wouldn’t work.”

Alongside Smart Centre, DrDoctor has developed an AI voice agent that can handle routine patient queries, manage bookings and provide pre- and post-appointment support.

An early version of the voice system was shelved because it sounded too robotic. When the team returned to the idea six months ago, advances in AI meant development took a quarter of the time, with the new version offering regionally accented voices that feel more natural to patients.

“Patients get frustrated when they can’t get through on the phone, and hospital staff spend huge amounts of time dealing with routine queries,” Whicher said. “AI can handle those brilliantly, freeing people to focus on more complex cases.”

The company plans to extend the voice agent’s role to include medical follow-up questions and recovery support, potentially reducing unnecessary return visits to hospital.

DrDoctor now manages more than 140 million appointments annually for 36 million patients across 70 NHS organisations, covering almost two-thirds of England. Despite posting revenues of £16 million in 2024, the company remains loss-making as it continues to invest heavily in product development and NHS deployment.

With waiting lists under sustained pressure and productivity high on the political agenda, tools that promise meaningful efficiency gains are attracting increasing interest. If Smart Centre’s early performance is replicated nationwide, AI-driven appointment management could become one of the NHS’s most effective — and least controversial — digital upgrades.