Rishan Patel, a PhD candidate in UCL Electronic and Electrical Engineering, has won two prizes at a national NVIDIA-backed hackathon and earned a personal mention from the UK’s AI Minister, all for an NHS tool built in a single weekend.
Patel teamed up with Khayam Umaur, a software engineer at JP Morgan, and Stephan Munroe, a UCL alumnus and CTO of Neuropath Bio, at NVIDIA’s Hack for Impact hackathon in London, held during London Tech Week. Working through the weekend, the trio built WaitWise, an AI tool designed to find NHS patients who have fallen through the cracks of the elective waiting list.
The problem is substantial. England’s NHS waiting list stood at 7.11 million people in March 2026, with only 65.3% of patients seen within the 18-week constitutional standard. Patients in deprived areas face disproportionately long waits, while younger patients are statistically less likely to be proactively contacted while they wait.
WaitWise screens every patient on a list against NHS clinical guidance, flagging those most at risk: those waiting too long, with no recent contact, or whose pathway has changed without follow-up. Each flagged case gets a risk score and a recommended action, and the highest-risk patients receive a drafted referral memo and letter, ready for a coordinator to review. An AI voice agent can also call patients directly to check whether they still need care. The system runs entirely on local hardware, meeting NHS data governance requirements.
The judges were impressed. WaitWise won first place in the hackathon’s Public Services pathway, earning the team an HP ZGX Nano AI Station, and second place in the ElevenLabs bounty for best use of voice AI. A separate Mozilla bounty added a further £10,000 to their haul.
Recognition followed days later at the National AI Awards, held during the AI Summit London as part of London Tech Week. There, AI Minister Kanishka Narayan named WaitWise among the standout projects from the hackathon and announced a new government support package for winning teams: an Open-Source AI Builder Fund worth over £500,000 in compute (160,000 GPU-hours from the UK’s AI Research Resource), and a mentoring scheme pairing winners with experts from the government’s in-house AI team, i.AI.
It’s a result that speaks well of the training Patel is receiving at UCL, where his PhD research focuses on non-invasive brain-computer interfaces for ALS patients, funded through the EPSRC UCL DTP and supervised by Dr Dai Jiang, Dr Barney Bryson, Professor Andreas Demosthenous and Professor Tom Carlson. Congratulations to Rishan, Khayam and Stephan on a brilliant result.
