HTN is delighted to reveal the finalists in the HTN Primary Care Awards 25/26.
The prestigious HTN Primary Care Awards celebrate GP practices, primary care networks, integrated care boards and suppliers, who have delivered improvements in primary care.
The awards provide a platform to share innovations, solutions, case studies, collaborations and projects to help shape future services and systems across health and care.
Join us for a digital awards ceremony, from 7pm – visit HTN.co.uk – 11 March 2026 to find out the winners.
To get involved in the awards evening or if you have any questions please email press@htn.co.uk
Modality Partnership: Building resilience in general practice – RPA at scale
Overview: Modality has automated over 900,000 clinical and administrative tasks and released 55,000+ hours of workforce time. With robust clinical governance, redesigned workflows and 24/7 automation, the project demonstrates improved safety and reduced variation.
What happened? Practices participated in workshops to identify high-volume, repetitive tasks suitable for automation. An expert team of GP Partners, clinicians and managers mapped workflows to identify inefficiencies, safety risks and unnecessary variation. Real-time dashboards allow staff to monitor bot behaviour and manage exceptions safely. Bots were piloted with early-adopter practices before being deployed across a total of 54 sites. The automation estate now includes more than 35 workflows, operating 24/7. Now, 900,000+ tasks have been automated, with 55,000+ workforce hours released, equivalent to more than 30 WTE GP hours across the organisation. 330,000 additional appointments have been enabled, offering 200 percent annual return on investment. Absenteeism reduced from 42 to 17 percent, and staff report markedly improved workload manageability and morale. Patients benefit from faster processing of repeat prescriptions, quicker communication of test results, fewer delays in registration, and increased appointment availability.
Redmoor Health: Doubling NHS Health Check outcomes in general practice through digitally enabled access and coordination
Overview: Redmoor Health partnered with Lancashire County Council and four GP practices to improve NHS Health Check delivery. The project increased completed Health Checks 2.6× and patients identified with previously unrecognised risk 2.7×, without adding clinical capacity.
What happened? Practices were supported to use more focused, risk-informed searches to identify and prioritise patients most likely to benefit from a Health Check. Practices invited smaller, prioritised cohorts in a planned sequence. This helped concentrate effort where it was most likely to make a difference. Invitations were issued in paced cohorts aligned to known appointment capacity. Patient-facing SMS invitations were redesigned to clearly explain what an NHS Health Check involves, why the patient was being invited and what to expect. Where available, direct digital booking routes were used to make it easier for patients to book and to reduce follow-up work for practice teams. A live digital dashboard tracked invitations, bookings and completed Health Checks by practice over time. Across four GP practices, delivered over a 12-week period with outcomes tracked over 18 weeks, completed NHS Health Checks increased 2.6×, from 394 to 1,010.Patients identified with previously unrecognised risk increased 2.7×, from 77 to 211.
Spirit Primary Care: Total Triage – Transforming primary care and exponentially increasing patient access
Overview: This project transformed primary care access by replacing the 8am telephone bottleneck with a clinically led, digital-first total triage model. It created capacity, improved safety and experience, increased same-day access, strengthened workforce sustainability, and reduced pressure on secondary care.
What happened? A digital-first, clinically led total triage model was implemented. Patients submit requests for care online to be reviewed and directed to appropriate pathways. Key features of the model include centralised triage decision-making, early clinical input to prioritise risk, demand stratification before appointment booking, and rapid resolution of low-complexity requests. Patients receive clarity on next steps within a maximum of 48 hours. Prior to implementation, 68 percent of appointments were face-to-face, with no online consultations. Following implementation, 57 percent of all appointments are now delivered via online or telephone consultations, while maintaining face-to-face care where clinically appropriate. Overall appointment capacity increased by 99 percent. There was a 40 percent increase in same-day urgent appointment availability, and 61 percent of all appointments across four practices are now delivered on the same day. 60–70 percent of online requests are resolved without a GP appointment. At one practice alone over 5,000 additional patients were seen.
Ringland Medical Practice: Developing a safe, comprehensive, community-centred and data-driven general practice in the Deep End in Wales
Overview: Ringland Medical Practice has been on a journey since 2021 seeking to position itself as a practice embracing the opportunities of the new Welsh Government-funded health and wellbeing centre – 19 Hills.
What happened? The practice now hosts a community connector two days per week, delivering holistic and social support including housing, income maximisation and assistance for patients who want to reconnect with assets in the local community to improve their wellbeing. It has focused on improving the safety of care delivered in the practice, including now regular patient safety and vulnerable adult MDTs, and psychological safety for staff, for which a partnership has been developed with University of South Wales. An integrated long-term condition pathway for patients is reducing duplication of care and ensuring holistic support through our community connector for patients whose conditions are being sub-optimally managed. The practice has ambitions to improve its continuity of care and has for this utilised the RCGP Continuity of Care toolkit, with the practice now hosting two 60 percent WTE GPs across four working days. Geraint, branch manager, has been pivotal in driving these efforts forward.
Elm Tree Medical Centre: Tacking clinical digital drag using automation and facilitating decision-making
Overview: During 2024, Elm Tree Medical Centre in Teesside embarked on a mission to remove staff time spent on low value work. The centre adopted a protocol-based system for blood test interpretations, reducing time taken for average blood test result filing from 85 seconds to 22 seconds per filing, saving £100,000+.
What happened? Elm Tree Medical Centre uses a SystmOne integrated protocol to file normal blood results quickly. For a typical list of 200 blood tests, a single click can now process follow-up actions for more than half of them automatically. The remaining cases are flagged for clinical review. The clinician manually chooses which function (protocol) to run using a simple GUI with pre-built options. Each function carries out a specific administrative step, like prescribing medication. Partners created dedicated hub teams comprising advanced medical practitioners and general practitioners. These teams took responsibility for on call duties, home visits, and the bulk of digital administrative work, allowing clinical staff to focus on patient care. Staff report greater enjoyment and fulfilment in their work, with more time dedicated to direct patient care and less spent on repetitive admin tasks. The system worked to reduce time taken for blood test interpretations from 85 seconds to 22 seconds per filing, saving £100,000+.
Stroud Green Medical Centre: Using AI to improve care planning quality and consistency in a GP practice
Overview: An AI-assisted care-planning initiative looked to improve care planning quality and consistency at Stroud Green Medical Practice, highlighting clinical workflow integration, outcomes, learning, and assurance.
What happened? An AI-enabled care plan drafting tool was developed that uses de-identified clinical information to generate a structured draft care plan for patients with respiratory, metabolic, dementia, and mental health conditions. The system accepts a de-identified extract from the EMIS record, uses a large language model via a secure API to draft a structured care plan, incorporates NICE guidance, North Central London (NCL) pathways, and local service information, and presents outputs strictly as drafts for clinician review. A GP reviews every output and makes substantive edits before the plan is finalised or shared with the patient. In practice, clinicians alter well over 50 percent of generated drafts, reinforcing that clinical responsibility remains entirely with the clinician. Early findings include significant reductions in clinician time spent drafting care plans, improved consistency in care-plan structure across LTC cohorts, positive clinician feedback on usability and reduced cognitive load.
Modality Partnership x Heidi Health: Releasing time to care: Scaling Heidi Health’s ambient AI scribe across Modality Partnership
Overview: Modality embedded Heidi Health across 50+ sites and 200+ clinicians. Over 1.2 million minutes of consultations have been transcribed, cutting documentation time by more than half, and freeing-up hundreds of clinical hours every month.
What happened? Modality partnered with Heidi Health to deploy an ambient AI scribe in live consultations, listening passively during consultations, generating full clinical notes, and drafting follow-up letters and care plans to be approved by clinicians. A 25-day pilot with 47 GPs, 2,879 consultations and 24,156 minutes of transcribed time proved acceptability and safety, more than halving documentation time and driving strong clinician advocacy. Rollout to 190+ Modality clinicians (now >200) across GPs, nurses, pharmacists and PAs, has meant over 1.2 million minutes of consultations transcribed to date, and 17,000+ consultations auto-transcribed per month, saving 530 clinical hours each month. 78 percent of clinicians reported it reduced time to write notes; 82 percent said referrals are faster; 78 percent noted that consultations had better rapport and eye contact; and a 38 percent improvement in clinician satisfaction with note quality was observed. 100 percent of patients approached in the pilot consented to using the AI scribe, and described feeling “more listened to” and more connected with their GP.
Ardens: Ardens Manager: A unified digital solution driving smarter primary care & population health for South East London
Overview: South East London now uses a single, system-wide digital platform to transform population health management in primary care. By implementing Ardens Manager, NHS SEL has unified data, enabled actionable insights, improved care delivery, tackled inequalities and achieved significant cost savings.
What happened? Ardens offered a single source of truth and a proactive approach to healthcare delivery and population health management, replacing multiple tools with an integrated solution. It offered 40 percent cost savings through a coordinated, multi-year procurement, including projected savings of £650,000 in medicines optimisation, and reduced clinical and admin workload. Working in partnership with the borough’s primary care and commissioning leads, Ardens delivered an onboarding programme for users, including webinars and regular progress check-ins. A new Data Sharing Agreement enabled secure access to population-level data at borough and ICB level, with patient-level data accessible to GP practices, unlocking population health management and supporting key initiatives such as delivery of the SEL Medicines Optimisation Plan. Ardens Manager provides SEL with advanced visual analytics covering population health, disease prevalence, prescribing, long-term conditions, and cancer screening, with segmentation by demographics, risk and inequalities.
Think Healthcare (Focus Group): Transforming training and access in Scottish primary care
Overview: Denny Cross strengthened GP training and supervision by integrating Think Healthcare’s cloud telephony into daily practice. Reliable recordings, callback and improved oversight enhanced learning, protected staff and improved access.
What happened? Call recording quickly became a core part of daily training. Trainees now take triage calls and sit with their supervising GP to listen back, review communication choices and identify learning points. The practice learned about live coaching tools that allow supervisors to join calls silently and guide trainees without the patient hearing. Callback was introduced and quickly became essential. Older patients in particular found it easier to engage with the practice. Reliable recordings now give immediate clarity when issues arise. Managers can review calls quickly, which protects staff and supports fair decision making. The practice is interested in upcoming AI call analytics. Supervisors will be able to search transcripts for key themes and identify calls where the patient sounded distressed. Training quality is strengthened across the whole practice, with every trainee able to review real calls and receive structured feedback that was not possible before, whilst supervisors gain clearer visibility of clinical communication, and patients experience a noticeably smoother route into care.
Innowise: Unified Care Orchestration – Transforming primary care through FHIR interoperability and proactive patient navigation
Overview: Innowise closes the gap between complex medical information and clinical action with our interoperable platforms for automating administration, increasing data liquidity through HL7 FHIR standards, and facilitating patient navigation to improve health outcomes.
What happened? Innowise’s cloud-native, three-pillar digital ecosystem covers data interoperability with an integrated semantic data layer that uses HL7 FHIR standards to directly interface with raw diagnostic equipment (vision testers, spirometers, etc.) to directly push data into the EHR system. The solution turns primary care data from a passive record to an active tool for clinicians. By automating the data transfer from the diagnostic equipment to the clinician’s dashboard, transcription errors were eliminated, and clinicians could access longitudinal health data in real-time. The system uses live data to identify patients who are not following their wellness plans or are not undergoing preventative care. By providing patients with a graphical representation of their healthcare journey, we were able to increase treatment adherence by 40 percent. The system uses its integrated live data to enable GP practices to identify high-risk groups. Solutions now manage 20,000 active monthly patients, demonstrating a 75 percent reduction in administrative friction and 3.3x faster data processing.
Modality Partnership x Liberate AI: Agentic AI for long-term condition management: Reactive to proactive model of care
Overview: Modality deployed an agentic AI solution, transforming long-term condition recall from manual and reactive. Automated outreach, AI-generated reviews, and seamless EHR integration now deliver faster access, improved consistency, workload reduction and a blueprint for AI-enabled population health management.
What happened? Modality launched an AI-driven asthma recall system in April 2025, deploying agentic AI LTC at scale to an 87,000 patient population. Using a proactive approach, more than 3,000 asthma patients were automatically contacted and invited to complete a structured digital assessment covering symptoms, control, triggers, medication adherence and red-flag indicators. Responses were stratified and triggered the next step in the LTC review process including clinical appointments and medication reviews. Liberate AI applied condition-specific clinical logic to patient responses, producing structured triage recommendations, draft clinical reviews, standardised coding, and clear follow-up actions. Digital-first pathways markedly improved access, with a 68 percent immediate digital uptake, and >80 percent total response rate. The agentic AI workflow delivered measurable operational impact including a 91 percent reduction in manual call volumes, 46 percent faster completion from invite to full review, and a 41 percent reduction in booked asthma review appointments.
Dr Rasib & Partners: Small practice, big impact: Partnership in action
Overview: Dr Rasib & Partners, a small GP partnership achieving big impact, blends innovation with the traditional family doctor ethos. Our team delivers compassionate, patient-centred care while embracing digital transformation, inclusivity, and system collaboration.
What happened? We became a Safe Surgery in partnership with Doctors of the World, ensuring migrants and vulnerable groups can register without barriers. Through the Dementia Action Alliance and Think Carers programme, we support patients and families living with dementia. This includes proactive carer identification, education, and tailored care planning. Rather than simply meeting GP contract requirements, we have used digital tools creatively and strategically to enhance patient care and practice resilience. We have adopted cloud-based telephony, enabling us to monitor call patterns in real time and adjust staffing to meet demand. We use EMIS searches and batch communications proactively for recalls. Staff feel valued, listened to, and part of a compassionate practice family – directly strengthening resilience and patient care. Patients value the continuity, compassion, and personal connection we provide – describing feeling “listened to,” “cared for as a whole family,” and “reassured that the practice knows me as a person, not just a patient”.
Elm Tree Medical Centre: Neighbourhood health in practice – What happens when primary care leaves the building
Overview: The Middlesbrough Mela is a large cultural festival, rooted in the South Asian community. Aims of the initiative were around early detection of long-term conditions, access, and trust. Elm Tree Medical Centre led the initiative, coordinated partners, and provided most staff at a total cost of £8,000–£10,000.
What happened? Over two days at the Mela, we assembled a team of 20 staff, including GPs, nurse practitioners, paramedics, reception and admin staff. Over the course of approximately 20 minutes, participants received blood pressure checks, BMI assessment, finger-prick lipid testing, HbA1c testing, QRISK3 calculation, and personalised lifestyle advice. Results were discussed immediately, face-to-face, with a GP signposting any follow up maybe required. A total of 165 people completed full assessments. 65 percent of people were overweight or obese, 35 percent had raised blood pressure requiring follow-up, and moderate to high cardiovascular risk was found in a significant minority. Based on clinical judgement, around 10 percent of abnormal results represented likely new diagnoses. Most participants were not registered with our practice, and many had not engaged with primary care for some time. Almost everyone received lifestyle advice. For some, this was the first time a clinician had sat with them and explained cardiovascular risk in plain language.
