Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking, if any, to support the use of AI-enabled appointment and scheduling tools in the NHS.

The 10-Year Health Plan was published on 3 July 2025, which sets out how the Government will ensure the National Health Service is fit for the future, where artificial intelligence (AI) will play a fundamental role in this transformation. As part of the 10-Year Health Plan, the Government is supporting the use of AI-enabled appointment and scheduling tools to reduce the administrative burden on clinicians, with early trials showing an increase in productivity and clinician time saved.

An accident and emergency demand forecasting tool is now available to all NHS trusts and is already in use by 50 NHS organisations, helping them plan how many people are likely to need emergency care and treatment on any given day. While this tool does not schedule appointments specifically, it uses AI to predict emergency care demand, enabling trusts to plan staffing and resources more effectively and reduce pressure on services.

The NHS continues to fund both pilots and scaling of different software products that enable the use of AI in scheduling and managing secondary care appointments. Typically, these include the ability to predict Did Not Attends, to reschedule appointments at short notice, and improve utilisation of clinician time.

Work has begun to deliver the NHS’s Medium Term Planning Framework commitment that, from April 2026, the NHS will begin to move to a unified access model, using AI-assisted triage. This model should effectively guide patients to self-care or to the appropriate care setting, through a single user interface delivered via the NHS App but with an integrated telephony and in-person offering.

Further to this, features set to be developed through the NHS App will include the ability to book and manage remote or face-to-face appointments, receive personalised health advice, see when vaccines are up-to-date, and book appointments to get them organised, and find travel vaccine info.

Additionally, DrDoctor, an AI tool, had a three-year contract from 2021 to 2024 with the NHS AI Lab Award. It supports hospitals by providing AI guidance on overbooking as a more efficient and economical solution to increase NHS appointment capacity. This has been shown to free up clinician and administrative time, improve patient care and experience, and predict which patients are at the highest risk of missing an appointment with “Did Not Attend” DNA Prediction.