Leading innovation in the UK’s NHS

The NHS Business Services Authority (NHS BSA) is a Special Health Authority and an arm's length body of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

It provides a range of critical central services to NHS organisations, NHS contractors, patients and the public, including: the NHS Prescription Service, NHS pensions, NHS penalty charges, NHS dental services, Total Reward statements, NHS injury benefits scheme, England Infected Blood Support Scheme, NHS Jobs, NHS ESR staff record, NHSBSA statistics, student services and information services.

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The national delivery organisation

Michael Brodie, Chief Executive at NHS BSA, explains the crucial role the organisation plays for the rest of the NHS: “NHS BSA is quite an extraordinary organisation. We’re the national delivery organisation, relied upon routinely by government, the NHS and local health economies to transition, to digitalise and to transform high-volume transactional business services, to operationalise them and to make them as efficient as possible.”

A prescription for success

Amongst its activities, NHS BSA operates the NHS prescription service, including processing more than 54 million prescriptions per month. Of these, 24 million are electronic, but 30 million are paper forms. The data from many of these paper forms will need to be manually keyed in by an operator.

NHS BSA decided to explore the opportunities to streamline this process through greater automation using Microsoft AI and machine learning technologies and a machine vision solution.

Surpassing expectations

Chris Suter is the Head of Digital Cloud Platform & Innovation at NHS BSA. He explains how the project with Microsoft has surpassed expectations. He says, “We’ve took one of our forms which was handwritten and which our current systems couldn’t deal with and we’re getting very high 90% of confidence from that data.”

Following the success of this pilot project, NHS BSA is exploring new ways to leverage the machine vision technologies within its operations.

Furthermore, the data captured and the wealth of data held by NHS BSA could drive further intelligence-led improvements. Michael Brodie explains, “We’ve been working with Microsoft to look at how we look at all our transactions, all our documentation, how do we get as much data from those forms using AI, using machine learning and then using that to drive better decision making for the NHS.”

Better taxpayer value, better outcomes

The machine vision project at NHS BSA could be rolled out more widely, not only within NHS BSA operations but across the wider NHS.

Michael Brodie concludes, “We believe that we can do so much more by using AI to read our documentation, to read more fields on that, and to read handwritten info, and to use that AI engine to deliver better taxpayer value, to deliver better outcomes, and deliver better patient safety.”

“We believe that we can do so much more by using AI to read our documentation, to read more fields on that, and to read handwritten info, and to use that AI engine to deliver better taxpayer value, to deliver better outcomes, and deliver better patient safety.”

Michael Brodie, Chief Executive, NHS BSA