The UK’s first AI-powered physiotherapy clinic, Flok Health, is expanding across eleven NHS regions, offering same-day digital appointments for patients experiencing back pain and other musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions.
Delivered through a smartphone app, the service enables patients to complete automated video consultations with an AI physiotherapist. The system evaluates symptoms, determines suitability for digital treatment, and provides personalised exercise and pain management programmes.
“Patients can pick it up and do their exercises at a time that suits them, rather than running around or taking time off work to get to appointments,” Finn Stevenson, CEO and co-founder of Flok Health, told Building Better Healthcare.
The service is now available in Cambridgeshire, Peterborough, Airedale, South Yorkshire (Doncaster, Barnsley, Rotherham and Sheffield), Northamptonshire, and three London boroughs, extending access to more than 2.4 million patients.
The expansion comes as NHS England continues to encourage the adoption of digital solutions to help manage growing demand for MSK services.
Early outcomes for MSK patients
Flok Health reports that patients can access appointments 24/7, with around 40% of consultations taking place outside routine working hours.
“Through our pilot deployments, we’ve already seen that our AI physiotherapy clinic has a direct impact on reducing physiotherapy waiting times and waiting lists,” said Stevenson.
Following a large-scale pilot in England last year, Flok’s AI clinic reduced waiting times across MSK conditions by 44% in under ten weeks, while back pain waiting lists were more than halved.
Early analysis also suggests the digital clinic is reaching more deprived patient groups compared with equivalent in-person NHS physiotherapy services, reflecting how barriers such as travel, time off work, and caring commitments can limit access to traditional care.
Patient feedback has been positive, with eight in ten users reporting that their experience was as good as, or better than, visiting a physiotherapist in person. Improvements in MSK-HQ scores averaged 6.16 points, exceeding the threshold for clinical significance.
“Our data shows that traditional barriers to care, such as travel, time away from work, caring commitments and inflexible appointment times, are far more exclusionary than requiring access to a smartphone and the internet,” Stevenson added.
Flok Health states that it is currently the only digital physiotherapy provider in the UK and Europe with Class IIa medical device clearance under the EU Medical Device Regulation (MDR). The company also claims its platform is the only AI system approved to deliver end-to-end diagnostic triage and treatment autonomously.
“We’re finding that the flexibility of our solution enables us to reach and support more people than traditional, in-person services can,” said Stevenson.