TORTUS AI partnership aims to ease GPs’ workload

London-HQ’d medical healthcare technology specialist, TORTUS AI has joined forces with X-on Health, the largest primary care telephony provider in the UK, with the aim of significantly easing workload pressures on GPs. The new strategic partnership, which comes after several years of collaboration between the two companies, will see the AI provider’s Ambient Voice Technology (AVT) harnessed to make a sophisticated clinical assistant, Surgery Intellect available to all GP practices across the UK, regardless of their existing telephony provider.

Surgery Intellect listens to face to face and telephone consultations and automatically generates accurate clinical notes, referral letters, clinical coding, and administrative tasks in real-time. The completion of paperwork takes up around 30% of a UK GP’s day and a material reduction in this overhead will be important as the Government strives to deliver against its commitment to provide an additional 100,000 GP appointments. TORTUS estimates that use of its technology cuts average consultation times by 25%, saving about three minutes per standard 12-minute session.

For users of X-on Health’s Surgery Connect cloud-based phone system, which currently serves over 3,500 GP surgeries in the UK, there will also be the ability to deploy Surgery Intellect anywhere in the call flow. This, for example, will enable automated transcription of incoming telephone calls at reception or voicemails.

AVT has a lot of potential in terms of increasing efficiency within healthcare settings. Indeed, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has gone as far as to call this technology a “game changer” for the NHS. TORTUS’s partnership X-on Health is certainly timely.

There remains, unsurprisingly, a number of data protection, regulatory and security related concerns regarding the deployment of AVT which require addressing. Last month, the NHS issued new guidance on the use of AI-enabled ambient scribing products in health and care settings (see here). This includes the view that a Gen AI driven ambient scribing product which goes beyond solely producing text transcriptions to conduct further processing, such as summarisation, would qualify as a medical device. TORTUS currently holds UK MHRA Class I Medical Device registration and is in the advanced stages of filing a Class IIa application.  

Posted by: Duncan Aitchison at 09:58

Tags: nhs   partnership   healtcare   genAI