Blog

Back to list page

Alleviating the digital debt

Written by: Laura Boyd - 29th April 2025

Just over a year ago my then 7-year-old came home from school excited to start his homework researching the Victorians.  He enthusiastically opened Google and started pulling out interesting facts, soon announcing he was going to write a book. “Fantastic” I thought to myself – what a wholesome activity.  A little later he proudly told me he was able to write pages of content at a time: not wishing to doubt my son’s genius, I looked over his shoulder and realised he was using Copilot to generate text. I  didn’t quite have the heart to shatter his joy!

On a serious note, as someone who loves innovation, it was a real light bulb moment – the age of AI is part and parcel of our lives.

Last month speaking at Rewired, David Bachmeier, Microsoft Copilot lead, talked about “alleviating the digital debt” so that healthcare providers can spend more time with patients.  By removing the (often) miserable experience of admin tasks, Bachmeier highlighted a wealth of positive impacts documented by Microsoft’s analysis of Copilot usage, all of which could be hugely beneficial in the NHS:

  1. Reduced workload
  2. Boosted creativity
  3. Lower stress levels
  4. Improved wellbeing
  5. Better collaboration

Whilst we’d expect nothing less than glowing reviews from Microsoft about its own product, the findings he shared rang true with feedback from NHS colleagues from our geography.

At the start of March, we hosted a training session in collaboration with The Inform Team which aimed to support NHS colleagues unlock the potential of Microsoft Copilot. I’d assumed attendees were likely to be from non-clinical roles, but on the day a real mix of non-clinical and clinical professionals joined from a range of primary, secondary care, community and mental health settings.

The spread of representation highlighted the wide potential Copilot has for healthcare beyond automating emails and administration.

They shared how they were already using Copilot in their work including:

  • Emails: Users use Copilot to manage and write emails.
  • Meeting administration: Copilot is used for taking meeting minutes and summarising meeting recordings with time stamps to help staff navigate relevant parts of discussions.
  • Document and idea generation:  Assisting in creating policy documents; generation of  ideas; analysing data 
  • Automation of complaints processes (replacing spreadsheets) and triaging complaints to correct departments or re-routing these to external organisations.

One area I found particularly interesting was where a colleague described how Copilot was used to generate decision trees to help think through a range of options that might not have been previously thought through.  The colleague described how this enhanced his thinking about particular problems.

Group discussions also explored where else Copilot could meaningfully add value to work:

HR and recruitment

  • Assisting in sorting job applications.
  • Work coaching: providing support for difficult conversations
  • Shortlisting for recruitment: ensuring applications/ interview responses match job description

Meeting and policy support:

  • AI notifications/ prompts if individual is mentioned when they are not in the meeting
  • Speech preparation for panel discussions

Clinical facing applications

  • Clinical roles: not used in front-facing clinical roles, but helps release governance capacity for better quality care

 Patient/ public interactions

  • Searching websites for information
  • Translation into different languages
  • Creating medication history lists (from integration with EPR)

The day revealed the continuing “aha” moments of how Copilot can alleviate some of the “digital debt” and bring a bit more joy to our work.  With the right understanding of the limitations of tools such as Copilot, I think I might just enjoy writing up that meeting/ preparing that PowerPoint presentation just that little bit more!

At Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber we are growing our expertise in how AI can deliver on its much hyped promise. We’d love to learn more about how you are using Copilot in healthcare settings and if there are experiences or case studies we can write up for you, please contact us at info@healthinnovationyh.org.uk

 For further resources/ support on using Copilot: