Customer stories
Federation doubles consultation capacity using PCN Hub
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We’re passionate about developing technology that allows you to spend more time caring for your patients, and less time completing resource-draining administration tasks. Ensuring that patients are directed to the right team in the right place is critical to providing the right care – but this can only be made possible with joined-up processes, robust data handling and streamlined triage.
EMIS Web PCN Hub provides the digital capability to make this a reality, supporting coordinated working across organisations that drives efficiencies and saves your valuable time.
We spoke with Mr Neil Kelly, Chief Digital and Information Officer at South Downs Health and Care, about how PCN Hub has enabled his team to double their consultation capacity.
Removing technical barriers
South Downs Health and Care are a federation that serves ten PCNs in Sussex. Not only has PCN Hub alleviated their administrative burden, but it’s also helped to drive considerable cost savings, whilst delivering enhanced quality of care to patients.
“I no longer have technological barriers slowing me down in a consultation, and now the speed of operations for our PCN is just dependent on how fast my colleagues and I can work"
Mr Kelly explained that Consultation Write Back more than halves the time it takes for him to complete a consultation. Considering the federation would deliver an average 200 hours of primary care per week (closer to 500 during winter), the impact on efficiency and time saving is enormous, allowing the team to see double the number of patients.
“We can view the patients, consult with them, prescribe for them and write back to the practice too with zero manual intervention. This has been a game-changer for us.”
Streamlining consultations
Mr Kelly explained that previous appointment sharing functionality meant that any given practice would be able to claim all available appointments slots on a particular day, if they were quick off the mark. This led to a substantial imbalance and directly conflicted with the federation’s contractual agreement.
The team chose to implement GP Connect which allows staff to share and view GP practice clinical information and data between IT systems, quickly and efficiently.
The features within GP Connect have saved over an hour every day for Mr Kelly’s workforce, with intelligent allocation of appointment slots to the appropriate PCN. With zero calls coming in from patients, they've also eliminated the need to allocate resource to deal with appointment reschedules or disputes, allowing the team to focus their skills on patient care.
Patients no longer need to be registered when they arrive in person, as their details flow through automatically and can be launched from within the system – contributing to more valuable time saving every day.
“Being able to set up groups and use filters to determine allocation of hours accordingly works 100% better for us, so whoever put that functionality in is a genius in my opinion!”
GP Connect Messaging is also an extremely powerful feature as it allows copies of the consultation to go to all offices in all practices, regardless of whether they use EMIS Web as their core system, this means that users are no longer limited by the system they are operating with.
The combination of streamlining, heightened efficiency and time saving delivered by EMIS Web PCN Hub has led Mr Kelly to now consider EMIS Web as the sole system of choice for South Downs Health and Care.