Dr David Okai, Consultant Neuropsychiatrist, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust

‘Less time on admin means more quality time with my patients’

Clinicians at South London and Maudlsey NHS Foundation Trust are using Microsoft 365 Copilot to automate routine tasks and so spend more quality time treating patients.

David Okai’s eyes widen and he smiles as he thinks of yet another potential use case for Microsoft 365 Copilot. It’s a lightbulb moment and illustrates the real-life impact Microsoft’s generative AI technology is having on people’s working lives.

As a neuropsychiatrist at the world-leading South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, David spends a mix of his time seeing patients and acting as a consultant manager. This involves a lot of admin.

“As an NHS consultant manager, the number of emails you’re subjected to is large – it can be close to 200 a day – so anything that can help us cope with that and increase efficiency is welcomed,” he says.

Summarising often long and complex email conversation threads using Microsoft 365 Copilot really helps prepare for meetings and ensure important items are not missed off the agenda – a regular occurrence even with “high-functioning individuals”, says David.

This summarisation ability is “golden”, he says.

And when time is of the essence, the ability to draft, refine and sense-check documents quickly is “incredibly helpful”, while the time to create an effective PowerPoint presentation has reduced by a third.

Model of brain on a desk (AI-generated)
David Okai treats patients with a wide range of neuro-psychiatric conditions

Summarising Teams meetings – which can involve many viewpoints if the topic being discussed is complex – really helps keep an objective, unemotional record that people can refer to later on when weighing up the pros and cons of a particular decision.

“Having this source of truth is fantastic and leads to more objective decision-making,” says David.

He now uses Copilot around eight times a day.

Quality time

David’s patients present a wide range of conditions: neurological issues with psychiatric effects, such as Parkinson’s patients with anxiety; traumatic brain injury patients with personality changes; unusual cases of dementia; epilepsy patients with complicated problems; people suffering from anorexia; and patients who exhibit neurological symptoms due to trauma or anxiety-based conditions.

Efficiency in managing emails and administrative tasks during his three allotted days as a consultant manager ensures that he can devote his full attention to patients, undisturbed by admin overflow.

In short, David feels that less time on admin means better quality time with patients.

South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust logo

Clinicians also benefit from this, he says. Technology that helps make sense of complex information quickly and allows clinicians to focus on patient care can only be a good thing. And happier clinicians are likely to stay in the job longer, so generative AI is also indirectly helping with staff retention, he argues.

Searching for simplicity

Hospitals are complex organisations, with specialists from a wide range of disciplines collaborating and exchanging differing opinions in the hope of reaching consensus on decisions that benefit patients, clinicians and the hospital Trust.

Microsoft’s generative AI tools are definitely helping untangle that complexity and keep track of debates and decision-making, David believes.

But no two days are the same, and emergencies – such as a recent cyber-attack that put their blood sample provider out of action – can derail the best-planned days. Technology that can help them cope with these unexpected events is invaluable, he says.

Looking to the future, an AI-tool that could marry the digital healthcare record management – writing up clinical notes after consultations, for example – with the operational efficiencies of generative AI would be ideal.

“There is a whole range of processes that could still be streamlined.”

And what was that extra use case for Microsoft 365 Copilot that made David’s eyes light up? It was the prospect of Copilot recording and summarising multidisciplinary team meetings, where healthcare professionals from different specialisms discuss patient cases and decide next steps.

“Being able to summarise those in the future would be amazing,” he says.

No going back

But these are still early days and given the importance of ethics and patient data confidentiality, the hospital is testing the technology to ensure that these multidisciplinary team meetings, say, could anonymise the recording so personally identifiable information remained confidential.

And David is keen to point out that Copilot is a tool that helps you with the job, it doesn’t replace the decision making or accountability. So you still need to check over the content Copilot has generated for accuracy.

But even taking this into account, Microsoft 365 Copilot still saves a lot of time and will enable clinicians not only to offer a better service to patients but also improve their own quality of life, David concludes.

“It would be awful to go back to a world in which we didn’t have Microsoft 365 Copilot!”

South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust is leading the way in how AI and Automation can be used to improve NHS services and has been involved in the development and testing of Microsoft 365 Copilot for several months. It is now hard at work developing its first AI strategy which will be launched in Spring 2025.