You may or may not have heard, but GP practices are being challenged to work and collaborate with other practices, and their Clinical Commissioning Group, to create new models for delivering primary care. And not new models for 2020, but new models for now.
Yet because each practice, federation and CCG has a unique set of challenges, each is going to have to come up with an individual model that works best for their locality, patients and circumstances. This is evidenced through the wide variety of ideas and patient delivery models being trialled as part of this initiative, most of which you can read about on the NHS website. There is no one-size-fits-all approach any more.
The common thread through these initiatives is the federating (combining) of practices with a singular infrastructure. Standardising on a single infrastructure, or application, delivers benefits such as economies of scale, cost savings and ease of support. But many of these solutions are simply “point solutions” that do one specific thing very well, but do not work with other point solutions to really benefit our newly federated GP practices.
For example, let’s take a look at the process of booking an appointment at your local GP practice. The component parts involved in delivering this are (i) a telephone system, (ii) an electronic patient record system and (iii) the receptionist team who bring the whole process together. Practices can choose to standardise the phone system and the electronic patient record system, individually, but the real value comes when the two systems are integrated and work together seamlessly. The net result of an integrated system is that receptionists can process a significantly higher number of calls during the morning rush hour. Additionally doctors can make outbound calls simply by clicking on the telephone number in the patient’s electronic record, and view a complete profile of contact with that patient.
To this end, many practises have advanced the appointment-setting element of their service by implementing Patient Partner through Voice Connect. This enables patients to make, change or cancel an appointment any time of the day or night by using their touchtone telephone. In practices that implement this system, it works well. However in very busy practices, federated practices or practices implementing a demand-led model such as that offered by GP Access, these systems need to work together in an entirely different way to deliver value that makes a difference.
The way I see it GPs should think of their phone systems like the evolution of mobile phones. Once upon a time all they did was make phone calls and that was just great. But today’s mobile phones do many more things that we have come to rely on. The mobile phone has evolved, and is now the device on which the power of the internet and mobile apps come together.
When GPs invest in their next phone system, they would be prudent to invest in a “smart” phone system. Even if it is only used for phone calls today, we can almost guarantee with the federating of practices and the standardising of infrastructure, future requirements will challenge the system to work with other applications. And when they do, GPs will be more than glad that they chose a system that had the built in capacity to bring everything together.
