Max Gattlin, GTM Director, X-on Health

For a reception team, the first sign of trouble is usually a patient saying the practice website will not load. Then the online consultation form disappears and the chatbot goes quiet. The telephone, which digital access was meant to relieve, starts ringing more often. That sequence played out across hundreds of GP surgeries in England and Wales after Silicon Practice entered administration, taking its parent company, Schappit, and a large share of the sector's digital shopfronts with it.

NHS England has said the disruption touches fewer than 500 practices. Trade reporting puts the figure closer to 600. The affected surgeries are spread across Greater Manchester, Norfolk and Suffolk, London, Dorset, Bath, East Somerset and Wiltshire, with further cases around Swansea Bay. The lost services include practice homepages, triage chatbots and the Footfall online consultation system, which for many practices was the main way patients made non-urgent requests.

Guidance from integrated care boards has made clear who must act. Responsibility for finding replacement websites and platforms sits with individual practices, and so does the bill. That position is legally orthodox, because GP practices are independent contractors. It is also demanding in practice. A partnership of a few GPs and a practice manager, already managing full lists, now has to run a procurement exercise, settle questions about contracts it may have paid for in advance, and keep a continuity plan working in the meantime. Health authorities have asked practices to protect essential patient communication channels while they do so.

The timing sharpens the problem. Policy has pushed general practice firmly towards online access. The national contract now expects practices to keep online consultation open through core hours, and the wider reform agenda treats the digital front door as the mechanism for managing demand without adding clinical staff. The logic is that a structured online request lets a practice triage, redirect and schedule work, instead of absorbing it all at 8am on the phone. When the digital route fails, the demand does not disappear. It returns to the telephone and the front desk, at the point where those teams are least able to take it.

Against that background, the response from X-on Health is worth examining closely. The company is offering all affected practices up to three months of free access to Surgery Assist Lite, an AI-powered digital assistant. It says the tool can be deployed in as little as ten minutes and needs no additional clinical safety work, which removes one of the slowest steps in introducing new software into a practice. For a surgery without a website, a ten-minute route back to a working patient-facing service is a material difference.

The design choice behind the offer deserves credit. Pointing every patient straight at an online consultation form restores a channel, but it also converts every question about opening hours or repeat prescription processes into a formal request that a human must read. Surgery Assist Lite answers common questions, provides practice information and signposts patients to appropriate health and social care services before they submit anything. Max Gattlin, a director at X-on Health, has described the aim as giving reception teams some breathing space while longer-term arrangements are made. That reads as a correct diagnosis of the problem. Restoring access matters, and protecting capacity matters equally, because a recovered front door that floods the team behind it solves little.

The offer goes further for existing Surgery Connect customers who also lost Footfall. They can use Omni Consultations, which combines online consultation forms with an optional AI voice agent. Patients can submit medical, administrative and prescription requests through the web form or by telephone, and both routes feed into the same workflow inside the Surgery Connect Phonebar. Practices can switch on the voice agent immediately or later. Keeping the telephone as a first-class route has policy value of its own. Older patients, people with limited digital confidence and those without reliable connectivity still rely on it, and a recovery plan that assumed otherwise would widen the access gaps that digital programmes are supposed to close.

None of this removes the underlying exposure. Three free months is a bridge, and at the end of it practices must still choose, contract and pay for a permanent service. The claim that no further clinical safety work is needed rests on the tool providing information and signposting, so practices remain responsible for checking that the answers and referral routes it gives are accurate and locally appropriate. AI at the front door also brings questions about oversight that a ten-minute installation does not settle.

The wider lesson is for commissioners and system leaders. Supplier failure in a market of small and mid-sized health technology firms is a foreseeable event, and the cost of it currently lands on the smallest and most stretched units in the system. Frameworks and ICB-level procurement could require exit plans, data portability and basic financial resilience checks from suppliers serving the front door. Larger commissioning footprints could hold standby arrangements so that a single failure does not generate 500 separate buying decisions. Those measures would cost little compared with the staff hours now being spent on improvisation.

X-on Health has shown what a prompt market response looks like: a low-friction tool, a clear view of demand risk and a team assigned to deployment. The NHS cannot depend on goodwill of that kind each time a supplier fails. If online access is to be the default way into general practice, restoring it within minutes should be a designed property of the system, and this episode has made the case for specifying it.