Reducing the time to register with your GP practice
Across south east London and the rest of England, GP practice staff are facing huge demand for access to primary care. To help solve this we worked with practices to understand what is taking time away from staff which could be done through digital tools.
We also sought to build on the successes of previous work in Lambeth which had identified and piloted potential solutions. With this insight, we were able to develop a programme to improve patient access to GPs using a suite of digital tools. The tools were aimed at improving the efficiency of services and to improve patient care.
One of the things identified in Lambeth was that there were many new patient registrations each month. Across south east London, this is around 9,000 new patients registered at GP practices. Until recently, this was done manually which meant that it took a couple of days, there were some errors in transcribing and entering the information which could frustrate patients and practice staff.
The results of this work have seen 140 out of 193 south east London practices adopt HealthTech-1’s automated registration process. During the 18 month evaluation period, 92% of 64,000 registrations were fully automated, giving patients same-day access to care. This saved an estimated 16,000 hours of staff time, and an estimated cost saving of £240,000 for general practice. This has also meant, on average, three days saved per registration for each patient.
Due to time saved on registrations and increased capacity, practice staff were able to complete higher value tasks such as care navigation, using the Pharmacy First scheme, call and recall, and document management enabling admin staff to spend more time on patients.