How CLEO'S Virtual Waiting Room is Transforming Urgent & Emergency Care
Across the UK, urgent and emergency care teams are facing unprecedented pressure with rising demand, workforce strain and fragmented digital pathways creating bottlenecks that delay care and increase risk – for both patients and clinicians.
While services like NHS 111, Clinical Assessment Units (CAS), Out of Hours, Urgent Treatment Centres (UTCs), ED and Same Day Emergency Care (SDEC) have made strides in digital triage, one challenge continues: the patient journey between first contact and clinician consultation.
CLEO Systems believes that transforming this ‘in-between’ stage is the key to unlocking safer, faster, more efficient care. And that’s exactly what its Virtual Waiting Room (VWR) technology is designed to do.
A smarter way to manage patient flow
Built to ease the burden on clinicians and healthcare services by intelligently automating and streamlining patient flow, the CLEO Virtual Waiting Room addresses that critical first stage in the patient / clinician journey. It’s not just a digital queue. It’s an intelligent, real-time queue management solution built to streamline patient flow, reduce missed contacts and free clinicians from unnecessary administrative tasks.
But the real innovation lies in how intelligently the queue works. When a case enters the VWR system, intelligent mapping priorities cases based on urgency, availability and clinician expertise.
Clinicians have a clear view of the patient record before they speak to the patient.
Patients are invited to join the virtual queue with a friendly automated message and when a clinician is ready to speak to a patient – instead of staff manually calling each patient before a consultation – a process that can consume minutes per contact and slow down services – clinicians simply log in and take the next assigned call where the patient is ready to speak to them.
The VWR can be optimised to include the organisations, business rules, DX Code, expected consultation length and safe waiting thresholds.
The result? The right patient is connected to the right clinician at exactly the right time. What could be simpler?
An immediate impact on efficiency and patient safety
For overstretched healthcare environments, the benefits are clear. VWR connects patients and clinicians creating a 50% increase in clinician productivity, services using CLEO’s Virtual Waiting Room report increasing capacity to five or six consultations per hour, simply by removing the friction from manual contact and scheduling processes.
Other key advantages include enhanced patient satisfaction and reduced no shows and failed contact. Patients receive real-time updates, greater transparency and reassurance that their consultation is on track, while automated communication means fewer missed or repeated calls, saving both time and frustration.
The platform ensures that clinically dependent patients are seen promptly based on safe criteria, not manual decision-making.
CLEO Virtual Waiting Room also provides seamless digital integration and works alongside existing patient management systems, including CLEO Urgent Care, with no disruption to existing infrastructure.
There are also real-time analytics which help service leads monitor performance, understand pressure points and drive continuous improvement, while full DCB0129 clinical safety compliance gives providers confidence in safe, robust deployment.
Designed with the NHS, for the NHS
CLEO Systems isn’t a newcomer to urgent and emergency care technology. With more than 20 years of collaboration with the NHS, CLEO’s mission has remained the same: to empower clinicians with intuitive digital tools that improve efficiency and elevate the patient experience.
As part of a UK social enterprise, CLEO is aligned with the NHS Long Term Plan to make digitally enabled care mainstream and to place technology at the heart of every out-of-hospital service. Being patient-first, not paper-first, CLEO’s in-house clinicians and developers work directly with NHS partners to design solutions that meet the real-world needs of call handlers, clinicians and patients across the Integrated Urgent and Emergency Care (IUEC) landscape.
Simplifying connected care
With demand on urgent care services continuing to rise, the need for smarter, more connected digital systems has never been greater. CLEO Virtual Waiting Room is proving that technology can do more than digitise a process, it can redefine an entire workflow.
By removing administrative burdens, reducing missed contacts, and enabling safer prioritisation, CLEO Systems is helping urgent care teams deliver faster, more efficient and more reassuring experiences for patients.
This is the future of patient flow. And it’s available today. Click here for more information.
