Practice Name: Bacon Lane Surgery

Location: Harrow, North West London ICB

List Size: Circa ~ 10,000 patients

Go-Live With Anima Documents: July 2024

Overview

When demand outpaces capacity, GP practices often face difficult decisions: increase staffing or risk falling behind at a risk to patient safety. At Bacon Lane Surgery, a growing stream of clinical correspondence threatened to overwhelm their document workflow. The practice opted to use technology tools to make document processing more efficient. With Anima, they’ve built a resilient, scalable system where one FTE administrator comfortably manages over 2,000 documents a month, with no backlog in sight.

The Challenge

The story starts well before Anima. Bacon Lane had already moved away from Docman, consolidating all clinical correspondence into EMIS. They averaged around 60 to 70 documents daily, sometimes peaking at 120 (e.g. after a bank holiday), with everything processed by a dedicated team. As volumes continued to rise, the team faced a pivotal moment: hire more staff or invest in tools to work smarter. They chose Anima as an AI tool.

Key Outcomes

Streamlining and Accelerating Document Processing Workflow

Anima's AI Document Processing consolidates all incoming documents, from scanned post, email attachments, and NHS MESH (electronic documents coming into EMIS), into a single workflow for safe, consistent and timely processing. The system automatically matched patients in 89% of cases in the last month, thanks to intelligent use of NHS number matching or a combination of name and date of birth matching. For the remaining 11%, manual matching was required to ensure accuracy without slowing things down.

Anima doesn’t just file documents, it helps summarize and clinically code them too. Each suggested code is accompanied by a quote from the document, providing transparency and confidence in the coding process. On average within the last 7 days, coders only removed 0.6 codes per document and added 1.2 codes per document, demonstrating the reliability of Anima’s recommendations while keeping a human in the loop to ensure clinical safety and make final adjustments.

In the first month, the median time from receiving a document to saving it to record was around 2 minutes. That quickly dropped to about 1 minute per document in subsequent months, reflecting a short learning curve followed by sustained efficiency. Since going live in July 2024, the team has processed over 16,000 documents (and 2,000+ in April alone) with one FTE staff member.

Enhanced Clinical Safety

Beyond the admin benefits, the use of Anima promotes clinical safety too. Documents are processed the same day, GP and pharmacy tasks are picked up reliably, and nothing slips through the cracks. It’s a workflow that’s fast, reliable, and easy to scale.

"Anima has made the coding process much easier for me and makes sure I don’t miss anything important like blood pressures or blood tests," Coding Team

 "It always picks up the GP and pharmacy tasks automatically, which was something I always worried about since it’s not always clear in the letter content. It has really made me feel comfortable that I can manage my workload in a timely manner which then benefits the rest of the practice." Coding Team

Improved Data Quality & Consistency in Clinical Coding

Anima plays a key role in enhancing data quality by doing the heavy lifting when it comes to clinical coding. By intelligently suggesting relevant and optimised codes (such as QOF codes) and ensuring existing problems are selected where appropriate, Anima reduces the variability that naturally comes with manual, human-led input. It promotes consistent use of similar codes across documents, helping maintain structured, high-quality data in the patient record that’s easier to audit, extract, and act on.

Improved Practice Resilience & Facilitated Upskilling

Dr Ali Abbas Hasham, GP partner at the practice & Digital IT Lead, puts it this way: “I think from a business and a strategy perspective as a partner, if my whole coding team fell sick tomorrow, I could train someone up in two days to take over that function.”

With Anima, Bacon Lane Surgery has proven that technology can do more than keep up; it can futureproof a practice. Their approach is now being looked at across the country as a model for how to build smarter, more resilient systems without compromising on patient care.

Ready to streamline your document workflow?

Like Bacon Lane Surgery, Anima can support your practice to cut administrative burden, improve practice resilience, and enhance patience safety. Book a free consultation below and we’d be happy to explore your practice’s specific needs.