NHS 24 handles around two million urgent care calls each year, with call handlers assessing symptoms, identifying risks, and directing patients to the most appropriate care pathways, such as out-of-hours GP support or A&E.

A recent upgrade saw NHS 24 implement a clinical reasoning engine – an AI-powered support system to help the call handlers for Scotland's 111 service.

On this week's episode of the ITPro Podcast, Bobby and Jane talk to NHS 24 CIO Ann-Marie Gallacher to discuss a complex AI transformation across a service that can't afford downtime, and what lessons IT leaders take from it.

"The reasoning engine is pretty unique; it is a powerful tool, the most powerful tool in our armoury. So the decision was, we need to replace everything, together, at the same time, and within a specific time frame."

"There were a few incidents that kinda stopped us in our tracks: global outages. There was Cloudflare – you probably didn't miss it on the TV when airports were shut down and banks; we were in the throes of implementing the technology that our new platform was using..."