AI GP receptionist can't understand patients after a stroke or with a strong accent

[Tia88]

A new BBC investigation looks at growing complaints from patients across South Yorkshire who say EMMA, an AI virtual receptionist and phone triage system now used by a number of NHS GP surgeries, struggles to understand them, particularly people with broad regional accents or speech affected by a stroke or other speech impediment. Healthwatch Rotherham manager Kym Gleeson told the BBC that accents specifically vary a great deal across South Yorkshire alone, and that EMMA isn't always able to parse those different regional twangs correctly, which understandably causes real, mounting frustration for the patients affected.

EMMA, which stands for Enhanced Medical Management Assistant, is built by a company called QuantumLoopAI and is designed to eliminate phone queues and streamline appointment triaging by handling incoming patient calls automatically before a human ever needs to get directly involved. Healthwatch Rotherham deliberately visited community groups likely to include people at genuine risk of being digitally excluded, including elderly residents, veterans, and people with speech difficulties following conditions like a stroke, specifically to understand how the system was actually landing with exactly those groups in practice. Gleeson said some patients have become so frustrated at not being able to successfully navigate the AI system at all that they've started physically traveling back to their GP surgery in person instead, since the usual telephone route simply no longer feels like a comfortable or even usable process for them anymore.

QuantumLoopAI responded by saying EMMA makes no clinical decisions itself, was trained across a wide range of accents and dialects, supports 17 languages beyond English, and is designed to transfer callers to a human member of reception staff whenever it distinctly can't handle a specific request. The company also reports that response from practices and patients nationally has been overwhelmingly positive, with more than 90 percent describing an actual improvement in their overall experience navigating the phone system, a quite different picture from the specific frustrations Healthwatch Rotherham has documented locally.

Both of those things can be true simultaneously though. A system that satisfies nine out of every ten callers while remarkably failing the tenth one is a real success by any straightforward aggregate measure, but it still functions as a real, concrete barrier specifically for the group least equipped to route around that particular failure on their own. South Yorkshire's integrated care board said it's aware individual practices locally are running AI reception systems of this kind, but confirmed that adoption remains an individual decision made by each specific practice under its own existing contract, meaning there's currently no centralized national oversight tracking exactly how many patients across the country might actually be affected by this same specific accessibility gap

AI receptionist could not understand me, says Doncaster stroke patientwww.bbc.co.uk