Anima cuts UK clinic call waits with OpenAI
UK healthcare startup Anima says its OpenAI-powered voice receptionist and document tools have cut clinic phone waits by at least 75% across more than 1,000 clinics serving 14 million patients.
Anima, a UK clinical workflow platform, says its AI tools built on OpenAI models have cut phone waits at clinics from 40–50 minutes to about 10. OpenAI published the figures as a customer case study, and all metrics are reported by Anima itself.
Anima says it serves more than 14 million patients across over 1,000 UK clinics and handles more than 800,000 cases a month. It is now expanding into the US and Australia. CEO and co-founder Shun Pang said the company chose OpenAI after benchmarking closed- and open-source models, citing "intelligence per dollar, and steerability with in-context learning."
The platform has three main products:
- Andi, a phone receptionist built on GPT-Live. A proprietary policy engine keeps intake on deterministic, clinically approved workflows, and GPT-5.4 mini picks the questionnaire. In Anima's surveys, 86% of patients said they would use Andi again.
- Documents, which uses GPT-6 models to extract details from incoming letters, match them to patients and suggest clinical codes. Anima says throughput rose from about 15 documents an hour to 30–45, and some clinics cleared backlogs of more than 100,000 documents within days. Engineering lead Michael Skupien said coding is hard because there are about 800,000 possible SNOMED codes. Anima adapts its coding to each practice through in-context learning rather than fine-tuning a model per customer.
- Scribe, built on GPT-5.6 Luna, which drafts consultation notes and referral letters in seconds for clinicians to review.
Anima puts its median case resolution time at about 3.5 hours. The case study gives no independent check of these figures, no clinical safety data and no pricing.