The Health and Care Expert

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NHS Problem

NHS clinicians face a constant challenge in keeping up to date with the thousands of health, social care, and community services available to patients, services that change frequently and are dispersed across multiple, outdated directories. Even with promotion, awareness remains low, leading to missed opportunities, inappropriate referrals, unnecessary hospital admissions, and delayed discharges, resulting in poor patient outcomes.  

  • £6m is spent per day on people who do not need to be in a hospital bed (£2.£2bn annually) 
  • £500,000+ is spent annually on managing the manual Directory of services in London alone, or c.£3.5m nationally. 
  • Better use of preventative services is expected to save 20% in emergency admission costs, as well as billions in health and care costs annually

Founder Story

The Health and Care Expert was founded by Elliott Ward and Jodie Adkin, both with deep NHS leadership experience. Having worked across frontline delivery, commissioning, and digital transformation, they repeatedly saw clinicians struggle to navigate outdated, fragmented directories of services, wasting time, delaying discharges, and missing vital prevention opportunities. Frustrated by the gap between available services and frontline awareness, they set out to build an AI-driven platform that delivers the right service information instantly, in natural language. Drawing on their NHS networks, system insight, and Harvard-trained expertise in AI in healthcare, they are creating a scalable solution rooted in real-world NHS challenges.


The Solution

The Health and Care Expert is an AI-powered chatbot that enables clinicians to find the most appropriate services for their patients through natural language queries. The chatbot integrates multiple Directories of Services (DoS), understands clinical context, and provides locality-specific recommendations.  Future modules will include an AI agent that sits on a ward or caseload, recommending when a patient could be safely discharged based on available community services. In time, this agent will also action referrals, partly fulfilling the role of a discharge coordinator and ward team. The feedback loops this enables will give providers and commissioners intelligence for future service design and commissioning with a level of precision which simply does not exist at present. This offers the opportunity to drive significant allocative efficiency in the NHS, supporting long-term sustainability. 

Impact

The potential impact on patients, clinicians’ time and efficiency of the whole system is significant and wide-reaching.   

 The Health Foundation found that effective prevention and early intervention could:

  • Reduce emergency hospital admissions by up to 20%
  • Saving billions in secondary care costs.

By directing patients earlier to community, social care, and preventative services, even a 1–2% system-wide improvement in prevention could save £1–2 billion annually in England.

Additional insights also show:

  • A modest 5% reduction in delayed discharges through efficient service navigation could save c.£110 million annually. 
  • Fully automating directories of service can save the system £3.5 million per year in resource costs. 
  • By streamlining service recommendations and referrals, clinicians could save 15–30 minutes per referral, freeing thousands of hours annually for patient care. 

The platform’s analytics will also enable more efficient commissioning, unlocking millions through better resource allocation, reduced duplication, and proactive service planning. This supports the NHS’s strategic aim to shift care and funding from acute to community services, enhancing prevention, early intervention, and diagnostic pathways for long-term system sustainability.