How Navenio is helping the NHS move from Analogue to Digital

The UK Government’s 10 Year Health Plan sets out a clear ambition for the NHS to transition from analogue to digital ways of working, but for many hospital leaders that transition has historically felt synonymous with major capital investment, infrastructure projects and long implementation timelines.

Navenio takes a different view on what that transition should look like, arguing that the shift to a Smart Hospital does not have to be a construction project and that the distinction between a hardware led and a software led approach matters enormously for how quickly and affordably NHS organisations can act.

For decades, hospital operations have relied on manual, largely invisible processes, with porters dispatched by pager, equipment located by walking corridors, and bed turnaround coordinated on whiteboards. These are the operational blind spots that slow the hospital down and drain staff productivity, and they sit directly between the 10 Year Plan’s clinical ambitions and the physical reality of delivering them.

The Plan envisions a Single Patient Record and a Digital Front Door, but those gains depend on the physical hospital moving at the same speed, which in turn requires real-time visibility of how people, assets and workflows are actually moving through the building without the need for major infrastructure investment to achieve it.

Navenio provides that visibility using AI and existing smartphone sensors, delivering accurate indoor positioning without additional hardware, no Bluetooth beacons to install, no cabling to lay, and no significant upfront infrastructure costs. Because the technology works with the devices staff already carry, it can be deployed quickly and with minimal disruption to live NHS environments where change must be carefully managed.

The platform combines location intelligence with workflow automation, matching staff to tasks based on proximity and availability and making operational bottlenecks visible in real time, and in trials supported by the NHSx AI Award this approach released the equivalent of 27 full time employees back to clinical care by removing logistical friction from their working day.

At Cumberland Infirmary, bed turnaround times fell from 108 minutes to 54 minutes during the NHSx trial, a 50% reduction that represents real additional capacity rather than a statistical abstraction, and the results have continued to compound since then, with porter response times now down by two thirds and cleaner response times down by almost half since the technology was first deployed in 2022.

Niki Trigoni, CEO at Navenio, said: “The results at Cumberland Infirmary show what becomes possible when you remove the friction from hospital workflows. Cutting bed turnaround times in half is not a marginal gain; it is the kind of improvement that changes how a hospital functions, and it is achieved without a single infrastructure project.”

The 10 Year Plan describes a move from a bricks and mortar NHS to a digitally led one, and Navenio supports that transition by creating a live operational picture of the hospital that helps teams understand what is happening, respond more quickly and make better use of the resources they already have, without waiting for infrastructure projects to complete or capital budgets to be approved.