This project is intended to equip Infix Support with robust systems and processes that will allow us to develop an approach to training and support for use of Infix: Schedule that will be easier to replicate as our product is used in more and more NHS health boards and trusts. Infix: Schedule is a dashboard used by clinical and administrative staff in the NHS to help schedule operation lists for elective surgery. The design consultants we have gathered to deliver this project have experience and skills to help us develop a truly people centric approach to our product across three key areas: -- Discovery. When we first go into a new Health board / Trust we need to understand their existing roles and processes so we can integrate out product as smoothly as possible -- Onboarding. A good introduction to our product, how it works and how it fits into their existing processes ensures successful engagement and results. -- Feedback. We have the desire to continually improve our product with new features and general improvement. Feedback from the users is the best way to find out how we identify and prioritise these improvements. NHS England statistics alone in May 2023 suggest around 7.47 million people are waiting for elective surgery, a slight increase on the previous month; nearly 3.03 million of these patients are waiting over 18 weeks. Improving the efficiency of these lists is a key method of reducing waiting lists. Through our initial pilot we saw theatre utilisation improve by 26.7%. We now have commercial contracts with three health boards, in an early three month evaluation we have already helped one health board complete an additional 570 operations, equivalent to savings of approximately £2 million. To be clear, we are not getting the staff to work longer or using more theatre time, we are just helping the hospital teams plan the lists and time they already have more efficiently. We have the digital tools to achieve these results, but with any digital transformation like this we need to work alongside existing processes and importantly people. Changing the embedded habits of real people can be hard. We have achieved that with our first few clients through a lot of face to face time and reactive support.

In Scotland alone, data indicates that NHS theatre lists for operations are running at below 60% of capacity due to a number of factors but primarily because of the widespread use of manual systems for input through paper-based and electronic spreadsheets. Infix is a clinician-led, cloud-enabled technology platform targeting significant improvements in theatre efficiency in the NHS. Incorporating high levels of security and privacy, Infix aims to automate and harmonise existing NHS legacy systems within the NHS with an intuitive digital interface that can be accessed by a single, secure web-based access portal. Internal forecasts indicate that operating theatre efficiency could be increased by up to 50% - saving the NHS hundreds of millions of pounds per annum, reducing the reliance on the private sector, improving low levels of morale in the NHS and, most importantly, saving lives. The NHS is facing financially unsustainable positions and, to make matters worse, Covid-19 is only going to exacerbate the situation and add even greater complexity. Overall and most alarmingly, the upshot is that patients face worsening health conditions and increased mortality rates because of an out-of-date system that requires a radical overhaul. We have developed a product to optimise the NHS's own data in order to make theatre scheduling vastly more efficient. We will do this with a technology platform which integrates with existing NHS systems and completely automates the generation of theatre lists. Infix will also allow other systems to link into our product such as bed capacity software, equipment tracking software, resource management systems and pre-operative assessment tools. Utilising artificial intelligence, machine learning and the cloud, Infix will bring about a new level of consistency across the NHS, facilitating knowledge sharing, nationwide benchmarking and the production of much more actionable data. The Infix team sees particular demand for its product as the United Kingdom moves through various phases of the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing and exacerbated waiting list backlog, and all the related financial and social costs that will result. While the focus of our first phase of development and growth concentrates on NHS Scotland, we see the application extending to NHS England, the rest of the UK and, further down the line, export potential in terms of take-up in international healthcare markets.