At Reed Wellbeing, we are all about making things better. Outwardly, our services are designed to help people lead healthier lives. Internally, we also have a strong focus on evolving and improving the ways that our services contribute to our mission.
As improved technology capabilities continue to further influence the design and delivery of public services, we have been collaborating with ContactEngine to make use of conversational AI software and improve the way we can interact with and support our health and wellbeing service users.
ContactEngine, developed by NICE, starts and runs intelligent conversations with our participants who have been referred to our delivery of NHS England’s Healthier You: NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme.
To showcase how technology is improving the work of Reed Wellbeing, our Divisional Director Nick Hughes was invited to speak at the NICE Interactions International 2024 event. The event is one of the largest CX industry events. Attendees were able to join workshops, listen to panels and network with industry leaders and analysts to share CX best practices, interact with digital experts and see up-close the latest innovations in Generative AI, cloud and much more.
Nick’s session ‘Is proactive prevention better than the cure?’ was delivered in partnership with ContractEngine’s founder Dr Mark K. Smith. Nick provided information about our delivery of the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme. This programme is designed to prevent the onset of Type 2 diabetes and ultimately save funds for NHS England by avoiding health complications associated with the disease in the long term.
Dr Mark K. Smith discussed how ContractEngine has wanted to work in the health sector since it was founded ten years ago as they recognised the benefits that AI can bring in helping to people to access to continue participating in critical services.
When participants are referred to us to join the programme, ContactEngine automatically attempts to contact them via SMS and/or email to offer details of courses that are near to them, including route planning details for each venue. There is also an option to speak to a member of our Programme Support Services (PSS) team to cover any questions that are not met by the content of the message.
Once the participant has chosen their course and venue, ContactEngine then automatically reaches out to them again nearer the date of the first session to help ensure that they attend.
Nick said:
Typically during 2023, we were seeing around 48% of participants referred starting on the programme. The first contract that went live with ContactEngine was Lancashire and South Cumbria. We received 541 referrals from this area in January, 58% of participants have now started on the programme. This is a positive improvement on our performance to date, and we expect to explore further ways of progressing this with ContactEngine. Exciting plans lie ahead in the coming months and years.