Insight: Enhancing diabetes prevention

Through our delivery of the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme, our Reed Wellbeing division has been supporting people to reduce their risk of developing Type 2 diabetes since 2016.

Reed Wellbeing’s Divisional Director, Nick Hughes, considers the opportunity that combining Artificial Intelligence with meaningful human interaction brings to enhancing diabetes prevention.

Reed Wellbeing is making use of advances in AI technology to help more people to reduce their risk of Type 2 diabetes. During our eight years of delivering the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme (NDPP), our service has evolved significantly to cater for high demand and accommodate increasingly complex delivery across seven UK regions. This has included the implementation of a dedicated, in-house contact centre that serves not only NDPP but Reed Wellbeing’s multitude of other healthy lifestyle services, along with the deeper utilisation of intelligent AI technology designed to enhance customer experience and increase service start rates.

Our participants’ journeys begin with a GP referral that is submitted to our in-house, dedicated contact centre – our Participant Support Services team. Based in Liverpool, the team supports all our Reed Wellbeing services to make sure that efficient support is tailored to local delivery, including:

• Data entry – a team that validates referrals across all Reed Wellbeing services so that engagement with newly-referred participants can begin quickly
• Resource administration – a team dedicated to booking accessible community-run, public and private venues required for local service delivery
• Call handling – a team supported by online decision tree scripts that enables agents to work compliantly across different health contracts.

Typically, our team of 30 staff handles around 5,000 inbound and outbound calls per week, working to an industry standard of ensuring that at least 85% of calls are answered within 20 seconds.

Having a central, in-house contact function is essential to our customer experience and our ability to meet demand for complex, large-scale contracts. We are members of the Contact Centre Management Association – the UK’s largest community of contact centre professionals. Keeping the function in-house allows us to monitor consistency and quality to support a culture of continuous improvement, making sure that people have a positive experience of Reed Wellbeing and the service they are referred to, right from the point of initial contact.

Diabetes prevention

Reed Wellbeing delivers the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme, which supports people to reduce their risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, across seven geographic regions. Our contact centre supports high volumes of GP referrals – more than 300 per day – for this service alone.

The process itself is complex and fast-moving, involving referral validation, patient engagement by phone, email and SMS and then, on successful contact, promoting the health benefits of the service. Those who join participate in 13 face-to-face or digital sessions across a nine-month period. To date, more than 127,000 people have been onboarded onto the NDPP by our contact centre.

In 2023, we conducted a review of call handling within our contact centre specifically relating to our NDPP service. On average, three call attempts were being made to each NDPP referral. Our aim was to seek a solution that increased sign-up rates and enhanced customer experience – including expanding capacity for contact centre agents to support participants with more complex needs.

In January 2024, we launched a pilot project in two of our NDPP regions with ContactEngine – a leading provider of intelligent, proactive conversational AI. Their technology specialises in automating and enhancing customer engagement using digital channels and engaging customers through natural language, dynamic conversations. Upon referral, ContactEngine automatically attempted to contact patients via SMS and/or email to offer details of local and digital courses, including route planning details for each venue. There was also an option to speak to a member of our contact centre to cover any questions that were not met by the content of the message.

ContactEngine would make several attempts at patient contact via multiple channels, each time giving the option to join the service or opt out. For those booking onto face-to-face courses, reminders were then sent close to the start date to re-confirm venue details and the name of the session coach.

Owing to the pilot’s success, in June 2024 ContactEngine was rolled out across all seven of our NDPP regions with excellent results:

• The wait time between GP referral and Reed Wellbeing patient engagement fell from 17 to three days.
• The time between referral received and first NDPP session attended reduced by almost 30%
• More people are signing up to NDPP, resulting in increased course fill rates leading to enhanced experience for attendees
• Our contact centre has more capacity to effectively support people who have more complex needs to join the service.

Across Reed in Partnership and our five divisions, people are at the heart of our AI strategy. As well as utilising it to improve participant experience, we make sure AI directly benefits our own people by enabling them to use their time and expertise in the best possible way.

Our combination of intelligent AI technology with a committed contact centre of dedicated experts shows just how much we can maximise the value of our services and, ultimately, help improve people’s health.