TORTUS and X-on Health expand AI assistant across primary care
Clinical AI assistants will be made available to GP practices across the UK through a strategic partnership between TORTUS and X-on Health.
TORTUS’ Surgery Intellect ambient voice technology (AVT) listens to face-to-face and telephone consultations and automatically generates clinical notes, referral letters, clinical coding, and administrative tasks in real-time.
It will be available to all GP practices regardless of their existing telephony provider, with additional benefits available to existing customers of X-on Health’s Surgery Connect cloud telephony system.
Julian Coe, managing director of X-on Health, said: “After several years of working together, we’re tremendously excited to finally announce our partnership with TORTUS.
“Many organisations are looking into AI medical scribes, but only a select few can achieve the rigorous clinical safety standards required by Medicines and Healthcare products Regulator Agency (MHRA) certified medical devices. TORTUS sets that benchmark.
“Integrating Surgery Intellect into our Surgery Connect and Surgery Assist platforms will unify previously fragmented systems into a streamlined, intelligent care navigation platform, ultimately improving patient access and easing pressures on GP practices.”
The integrated Surgery Intellect product is expected to be available from mid June 2025 at 10 integrated care boards which have approval to deploy the product.
Surgery Connect customers will be able to deploy Surgery Intellect anywhere in the call flow, for example to transcribe incoming telephone calls at reception or voicemails.
Dr Dom Pimenta, chief executive and co-founder of TORTUS, said: “X-on Health was the clear choice as our primary care partner.
“Their telephony systems sit at the heart of GP patient access, with over 40 million calls a month, and our combined offering directly addresses NHS connectivity challenges.
“With TORTUS already operational nationwide in hospitals and ambulance services, this collaboration sets a new standard for connected, efficient healthcare delivery, significantly improving clinicians’ working lives.”
The announcement follows a multi-site trial of TORTUS’ AVT technology, led by Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, involving more than 7,000 patients across adult outpatients, primary care, paediatrics, mental health, community care, A&E and the London Ambulance Service.
Interim results from the evaluation, published by the Department of Health and Social Care in April 2025, found that AVT “dramatically” reduced admin, allowed clinicians to spend more time with patients and enabled more patients to be seen in A&E.
Full results from the trial are expected to be published in 2025, with an additional paper detailing TORTUS’s rigorous clinical evaluation framework also to be published in Nature Digital Medicine.
NHS England published guidance on 27 April 2025, encouraging NHS clinicians to use speech technologies and generative AI to transcribe patient consultations and turn them into structured medical notes and letters.
The guidance provides an overview of ambient scribing products and key considerations for chief information officers and chief clinical information officers leading AI adoption in health settings.
Meanwhile, Accurx and Tandem Health announced on 29 April 2025 that they have launched an AI scribing tool across the NHS that transcribes, summarises and codes patient consultations into a trust’s clinical record.
