Transforming patient access through automated GP registrations across South East London
Challenge
Across South East London Integrated Care Board (ICB), GP practices face significant administrative burden from manual patient registration processes. Each new registration requires around 15 minutes of staff time to process paper or online forms and input data into outdated clinical systems. As a result, patients were waiting an average of 3.5 days before gaining access to care. This process also increases the risk of data entry errors, which could compromise patient safety and care quality. With rising demand for GP services, the system is creating unnecessary delays, reduced efficiency, and placing additional strain on already stretched practice teams.
Solution
To address these challenges, South East London ICB implemented an automated registration system, Healthtech-1, across their GP practices.
The innovation automates the end-to-end registration process by securely matching patients to their NHS records, completing clinical coding, and submitting details directly into the practice system.
“I’m super passionate about making access to the NHS incredible. It starts at the registration point and our work with ICBs mean patients across a whole region get registered in hours, not days!”
In practice, the solution eliminated tedious manual data entry, so staff no longer had to spend 15 minutes per patient inputting registration forms into legacy systems. This frees up administrative capacity within GP practices, increases speed of access for patients, and reduces the risk of data-entry errors.
Impact
The rollout of automated registrations through Healthtech-1 to 72% of South East London ICB practices transformed how new patients access primary care. By automating 92% of all new patient registrations, the system enabled same-day registration and access to care, compared with an average wait time of 3.5 days before implementation. Over the 12-month pilot, this saved patients the equivalent of 530 years of waiting for access to healthcare.
“At 3 days saved on average per registration we have saved patients 530 years of waiting for care.”
“We’re at around 9,000 registrations a month just for South East London that are being automated. If you think about the time that’s being saved for those patients, that’s phenomenal!”
For GP practices, the innovation freed up around 16,000 hours of staff time, generating an estimated £240,000 in cost savings across the system. This time saving allowed practice staff to focus on other priorities such as supporting patient care, managing complex cases, and improving patient experience.
“Rolling out automated new patient registrations with the team at Healthtech-1 was the most positive and rapid mobilisation I’ve been involved in. 90% of the practices were live within 4 weeks and now 89 practices are live and we’ve had over 49,000 registrations automated since March, all processed in hours instead of days. What a massive improvement for our patients!”
In addition to improving efficiency and reducing administrative burden, automating the registration process enhanced data accuracy and safety by reducing the potential for human error in clinical coding. Together, these benefits have significantly increased capacity within primary care, improved patient access and satisfaction, and strengthened the overall resilience of general practice across the ICB.
Read more about Healthtech-1’s implementation across NHS South East London ICB on their website.
