Every patient request
safely resolved

Jackie answers calls concurrently, not one after another, so the morning peak can be handled in parallel instead of stacking up behind a fixed number of receptionists. A patient who would otherwise have waited on hold can be answered immediately, with the routine request completed or routed while the call is happening.

The surge itself does not change. What changes is that the practice no longer has to size its reception capacity around a short, unusually intense morning peak.

Yes. You can listen to a recorded patient call before you speak to anyone here — including the point where Jackie reaches a request she cannot complete and hands it to a person.

A demo then shows how Jackie would handle your own request types on a live queue.

Jackie can answer inbound calls concurrently, so patients do not have to wait for another Jackie conversation to finish before theirs begins.

That removes the fixed receptionist-capacity bottleneck behind much of the traditional phone queue and reduces the time patients spend waiting on hold, where abandoned calls are most likely to occur.

Jackie can handle calls concurrently, so she does not have to finish one conversation before answering the next. There is no fixed per-practice limit within Jackie on the number of simultaneous conversations she can handle.

In practice, the number of calls that can reach Jackie at exactly the same moment can still depend on the capacity and configuration of your telephony.

For many patients, being answered straight away is preferable to waiting in a phone queue — particularly when they are calling about a routine request that Jackie can deal with there and then.

Not everyone wants to speak to an AI, and they do not have to. Jackie tells patients at the start of the call that they are speaking with an AI assistant, and a patient can ask for a person at any point. Jackie then follows the practice’s configured route to the reception team.

The important thing is that the choice remains with the patient: they can use Jackie for a faster route through a routine request, or ask to speak to a person instead.

Yes. Jackie adds capacity alongside the reception team, not in place of it. She takes on routine volume that would otherwise occupy the phone queue, which means the patients who most need a person are more likely to reach one.

Requests outside the practice’s defined administrative rules go to the team with the information already gathered, so reception can pick them up with the context in hand.

Administrative ones. Jackie handles the administrative steps within workflows such as appointment requests, screening and vaccination requests, prescriptions, sick notes and results enquiries, using rules approved by the practice.

She does not make clinical decisions and does not triage patients.

Where a request requires clinical judgement, Jackie passes it to the appropriate clinical route with the information already gathered. Jackie does not answer the clinical question herself and is not a medical device.

Jackie works over the phone, so a patient needs no smartphone, app, password or NHS login. For someone who finds online forms difficult, speaking to Jackie can provide a simpler route into the practice than a digital form.

Patients can ask Jackie to repeat information, explain what she needs or slow the conversation down.

Accessibility is one of the areas covered by Jackie’s DTAC assessment.

Yes. Jackie uses speech recognition selected specifically for British English, rather than a general-purpose system adapted for UK use afterwards. Performance across regional accents was an important part of that choice.

Jackie already answers patient calls at a practice in Liverpool, where she regularly handles a wide range of local accents successfully.

Jackie monitors how reliably she is understanding the conversation. If speech recognition is not working well enough — because of a speech difficulty, poor phone line, background noise or another issue — she routes the caller to reception automatically.

The patient does not need to recognise that there is a problem or ask to be transferred. Jackie hands the call over when she is no longer confident that she is understanding the patient reliably.

Jackie becoming unavailable is very unlikely. She runs on Microsoft Azure UK with multi-zone redundancy and automated failover, so the service is designed to remain available even when individual infrastructure components fail.

If Jackie does become unavailable, calls follow the practice’s configured continuity route, such as routing to human reception. Patients therefore still have a route into the practice rather than being dependent on Jackie being available.

Behind that sits a documented disaster recovery plan, which Auxilis tests quarterly and rehearses in full once a year. The plan and recovery targets are available to practices as part of deployment.

Jackie works with the telephony, clinical and patient-access systems a practice already uses, including integrations with EMIS Web, SystmOne, Accurx, SystmConnect and eConsult.

That means completed actions can appear in the systems the team already works in rather than requiring reception to manage a separate interface.

Other systems can be assessed during deployment, subject to their available integration methods, information-governance requirements and technical compatibility.

Yes. Alongside answering inbound calls, Jackie can call patients who are due a seasonal vaccination, handle the approved administrative parts of the conversation and book appointments directly into the appropriate system.

That means the invitation and booking can happen in one conversation instead of generating a return call to reception.

Anything requiring clinical judgement — including whether a particular vaccine is appropriate for a particular patient — goes to the practice team. Jackie does not make that decision.

Your practice remains Data Controller and keeps control over which workflows Jackie is permitted to perform.

Auxilis maintains the DCB0129 clinical safety case and hazard log and provides your practice with pre-filled DCB0160 deployment documentation to review rather than a blank template to complete.

Nothing goes live until your clinical safety officer signs. That step is yours, and Auxilis does not move without it. Auxilis provides the documentation and evidence needed to support that review.

Jackie is assessed against DTAC 2.0, compliant with the NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit, certified to Cyber Essentials Plus, aligned to ISO 27001, and developed in accordance with the NHS clinical risk management standards DCB0129 and DCB0160.

Auxilis also commissions annual penetration testing to CHECK standards.

Jackie creates an auditable record of interactions, actions and outcomes needed for governance and review, with appropriate access and retention controls applied to that information.

A standard deployment typically takes around four weeks, and some practices can go live in around two.

Timing depends mainly on practice approvals, system access, configuration and the requirements of the deployment.

Practices already running Surgery Connect and Accurx may be eligible for the fast-track route, where Jackie can start answering routine calls by the next working day, subject to practice approvals, system access and deployment availability.

Not extensive training. Auxilis runs a one-hour session with the practice team so everyone can get familiar with Jackie, see how she handles calls and ask questions before she goes live.

Jackie works with the telephony and clinical systems the team already uses, so reception does not have to learn a separate day-to-day interface.

Practices have a direct online support route to the Auxilis team after go-live, rather than being left with documentation alone.

Issues affecting live patient calls are prioritised through the same operational escalation process used during deployment.

Jackie is charged per effective call hour, rather than per seat or per practice, so the cost follows the volume of calls actually handled.

The calculator uses your own call volumes to estimate both the cost of Jackie and the reception capacity that could be recovered.

We publish measured results from live deployments, including what Jackie handled, how much reception capacity was recovered and the period over which the results were measured.

You can also see what the practice team itself said about the deployment.