Healthcare communication platform Accurx has launched a brand new focused appointment reserving characteristic that its CEO says is proving standard with GPs, practices and sufferers throughout the NHS throughout its first few months of use.
The characteristic permits all GP practices in England to ask massive cohorts of sufferers to ebook appointments, together with vaccinations like flu, and has already been utilized by over a million sufferers to ebook appointments for Covid or flu jabs.
It really works by a GP follow sending an SMS with a reserving hyperlink for an appointment to a big cohort of sufferers in a single go which can say, for instance: “You might be due for an annual flu vaccination. To ebook, please observe this hyperlink inside 48 hours.”
Invited sufferers obtain a textual content message with a singular reserving hyperlink, and as soon as they click on on their hyperlink and confirm themselves utilizing their date of delivery, they’ll select a time slot as much as six weeks prematurely that works for them.
As soon as the affected person confirms their appointment, they’re robotically booked into their GP follow’s scientific appointment ebook in EMIS or SystmOne.
Jacob Haddad, CEO and co-founder of Accurx, spoke solely to Digital Well being Information concerning the new reserving characteristic on the platform and the way the method to the net reserving mannequin has modified.
He mentioned: “On-line reserving isn’t a brand new factor, it has been round for so long as Accurx has existed. However the issue with current options has been if a follow makes an appointment accessible on-line, anybody can ebook it for any motive.
“We’ve utterly flipped the net reserving mannequin to 1 the place a affected person is invited to ebook a sure kind of appointment. So we’re attempting to method appoint reserving very in a different way to what’s been executed earlier than however nonetheless in a really built-in approach with their current methods.”
The characteristic goals to assist GP practices extra simply handle appointment reserving by:
- Saving very important time by streamlining workflows and lowering the handbook processes concerned in scheduling appointments.
- Liberating up telephone traces, as sufferers will ebook their appointments on-line as a substitute of calling the GP follow to rearrange them.
- Offering simpler entry to take care of tens of millions of sufferers and enhancing their expertise, leading to fewer ‘Did Not Attends’ for GP practices.
Suggestions on the characteristic from GPs and practices has been “glowing” in line with Haddad, who mentioned that “sufferers like it too”.
One GP who has been utilizing the brand new characteristic throughout flu season is Dr Amar Ahmed MBBS (Lond) DCH DRCOG MRCGP, companion and GP coach at Wilmslow Well being Centre.
He mentioned: “Flu season is all the time extremely busy in major care, even at the most effective of occasions. With such an enormous quantity of sufferers to ebook in, our groups are positioned below immense stress.
“This new reserving characteristic from Accurx goes to revolutionise the way in which we organise our vaccination programme. Via one easy textual content message, the time our GP employees spend scheduling vaccination appointments will likely be dramatically decreased, giving them extra capability to ship very important affected person care.”
There have been constructive reactions to the characteristic throughout the nation, with plans to increase the usage of it to much more GP practices in England and ultimately exterior of England too.
Nikki, a follow supervisor in Somerset, was additionally very enthusiastic concerning the influence of the brand new vaccination reserving characteristic.
She mentioned: “Accurx has been a complete game-changer this flu season. Our uptake has been better, partly as a result of sufferers have been capable of self-book I imagine.
“We’ve got actually saved hours of time contacting and reserving sufferers and now stay up for seeing how we are able to use this for different appointment varieties.”
Accurx continues to make waves within the NHS, evident in direction of the top of 2022 when the platform introduced it had efficiently integrated its online consultation tool, Patient Triage, with the NHS App
