Appt Health: Making proactive care more equitable
Find out how Appt Health can help practices to identify and meaningfully engage with patients who need proactive care.
After witnessing these challenges firsthand while volunteering in an East London GP practice, economist and behavioural science specialist Hector Smethurst founded Appt Health. It helps practices identify, prioritise and engage patients who need proactive care, using personalised approaches designed to improve access and reduce health inequalities.
Now a 2026 NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) fellow, Hector is scaling the innovation across primary care while exploring how technology can support the future of neighbourhood health.
What is Appt Health and what problem does it solve?
Appt Health has developed two complementary products: Appt Recall and Appt Coordinate.
The first, Appt Recall, automates patient engagement to help GP practices reach people who are overdue for preventative care, including immunisations, health checks and cancer screening. Drawing on behavioural science, it personalises patient invitations to encourage more people to book and attend appointments, particularly those from underserved communities.
Building on this, Appt Coordinate supports the wider care coordination pathway by helping practices identify patients who need care, prioritise them based on clinical need, understand available capacity and match patients with the most appropriate appointments.
For many GP practices, the challenge is making sure that the people who need preventative care the most are no longer the least likely to receive it.
Today, more than 200 GP practices are using Appt Health’s technology, with evidence showing improvements in uptake of preventative services, including an 18% increase in lung cancer screening participation at one site.
“The NHS is often built in a one-size-fits-all way, which causes certain patients to be disengaged. We wanted to create a system that meets patients where they are, rather than expecting everyone to fit around the system.”
“The NHS is often built in a one-size-fits-all way, which causes certain patients to be disengaged. We wanted to create a system that meets patients where they are, rather than expecting everyone to fit around the system.”
What was your inspiration and motivation?
The idea for Appt Health grew directly from Hector’s experience volunteering as a care coordinator in an East London GP practice.
While contacting patients who were overdue for care, he repeatedly encountered scenarios that prevented people from accessing services. For example, once when calling a patient about booking a flu jab, they answered speaking Bengali, but that wasn’t recorded anywhere. By the time a colleague who could translate, the patient had hung up, and we never managed to reach them again.
Experiences like this highlighted the structural barriers many patients face, and rather than accepting those inequalities, he began experimenting with different ways of communicating with patients, testing everything from the timing of messages to behavioural prompts and appointment offers.
Through iterations, with the first version feeling very ‘Wizard of Oz’ with Hector behind the scenes pretending to be an automated system, Appt Health was developed to support frontline teams to implement these new approaches themselves.
“Practices would love to do these things, but they’re working so hard just to stay afloat. That’s when I realised there was a need for a service that could do it for them at scale, so that is what I developed.”
Hector Smethurst, Founder, Appt Health
Why did you become a fellow?
Joining the NIA felt like the natural next step as Appt Health’s evidence base continued to grow. Hector had developed the technology and demonstrated that it can increase uptake of preventative care while helping reduce inequalities between different patient groups.
Being a 2026 fellow is providing the opportunity to spread the innovation across the NHS, and provide a community of fellow innovators going through the same process.
As a solo founder, he says having access to peers who understand the challenges of building and scaling innovation has already proved invaluable.
“Having people who are on the same journey, who you can lean on and ask for advice, is a massive advantage.”
Whether discussing best practice around translated patient communications or learning from others’ experiences, he believes the network is one of the Fellowship’s greatest strengths.
Looking ahead
With more than 200 GP practices already using Appt Health, Hector hopes to expand across many more of England’s 6,000 practices while continuing to develop Appt Coordinate’s care coordination capabilities.
Beyond primary care, he also sees an opportunity to support the emerging neighbourhood health agenda.
“We want to understand what different neighbourhoods need and build technology that helps them coordinate proactive care across their populations.”
But at the core, the ambition remains the same as when Hector first started making phone calls in that East London practice: making sure that people who need care the most are no longer the least likely to receive it.
Want to find out more? Visit the innovation page where you can contact the innovator directly, or check out their website.
