This week the UK Government unveiled the results of an AI pilot that they conducted with Microsoft 365 Copilot. The government notes that it is the largest study of its kind and it involved more than 30,000 NHS workers. The focus of the pilot was on time savings and productivity.
They found that “AI-powered administrative support” could save an average of 43 minutes per staff member per day. The time savings come from several activities:
Time saved from automatically taking notes from online Team meetings (saving 83,333 hours per month) Additional time was saved summarizing long and complex email chains.
As a result of the pilot, more than 50,000 NHS members will have access to these features. It makes a lot of sense to focus on low risk, high volume administrative procedures in healthcare first. The Digital Medicine Society recently released a playbook for implementing AI in healthcare. In the playbook they specifically advocate for focusing on “high-volume administrative tasks” - the idea is to focus on “quick” wins that add cumulative value. In turn these wins help generate more buy-in and institutional knowledge to support the addition of higher risk models.