South East Coast Ambulance Service (SECAMB) NHS Foundation Trust has shared insights and upcoming milestones from its digital transformation programme, noting details of work around data, AI, and auto-dispatch.
The service sets out a series of priority workstreams for clinical productivity, including auto-allocation of calls (hear & treat), with emergency operations centre roll out in Q1 2026/27; automation of its emergency crew advice line process with go-live expected by the end of Q3 2026/27; and ongoing work to optimise EPR information flows. Automation of clinical audit is currently being scoped, with plans for delivery in Q3 2026/27.
Delivery of a core cloud-based data platform remains “on track”, the board shares, an enterprise architect has been appointed, and a data and AI strategy is being developed. Use of Tortus ambient scribe was not mandated during the trust pilot, it continues, meaning the dataset gathered is “small and unrepresentative”, limiting available evidence on effectiveness, with this to be addressed ahead of a business case in August.
“The M365 Copilot business case does not demonstrate a financial saving and funding is not available to expand use,” SECAMB states. A benefits realisation framework will help to highlight benefits “honestly”, with post-deployment reviews expected at three, six, and 12 months.
The trust shares key performance indicators and benefits, with data, AI, and shared care records being measured via reduction in average job cycle time, with a target of a one-minute reduction by the end of Q4 that has already been bypassed. Auto-dispatch is hoped to reduce time taken to allocate crews to category 2 calls by one minute by Q4, so far having achieved an 11 second reduction; and its intelligent call queue is hoped to increase the number of calls per hour per clinician, with a target of an 0.1 increase almost completed (from baseline of 1.35 to current 1.43).
Wider trend: Health AI
For a recent session focusing on AI in healthcare, HTN was joined by an expert panel including Simon Brown, head of digital at Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust; Wahida Jabarzai, clinical AI and automation delivery lead at University Hospitals of Northamptonshire and University Hospitals of Leicester; and Julian Wiggins, healthcare solution director at Rackspace Technology. Our panel considered the wider challenge of AI adoption, looking at what makes a successful deployment, introducing AI safely and sustainably at scale, and some of the use cases currently delivering value across their organisations.
An AI system is being used to colour code internal anatomy during surgery at London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust, said to help surgeons to see subtle structures that might be hard to distinguish with the eye. The Eureka system analyses the surgical field in real-time, overlaying colours onto structures such as nerves and connective tissue. Surgeons are able to choose between keeping the overlay constant, or having it pulse intermittently during different stages of a procedure. St Mark’s National Bowel Hospital is one of the sites helping to evaluate the system. Kapil Sahnan, colorectal surgeon, was one of the first to try out the new system during a bowel resection procedure, describing it as like having an “extra arm”.
Expressions of interest are being sought from manufacturers and Greater London NHS organisations for MHRA’s AI regulatory sandbox for the London region, with projects to be selected to participate in the initial phase deploying tech into live clinical settings. The initiative, London Region I, is set to create a real-world environment for the safe deployment of AI-enabled medical devices, offering the chance to generate evidence of benefits from NHS settings, and promote earlier patient access to new technologies, the MHRA reports.
