eConsult Health – the UK’s leading digital triage and remote consultation platform – has announced that it has started to roll out its Smart Inbox to Primary Care eConsult customers to support them with increasing patient demand.
The Smart Inbox – which provides Practices with a customisable and collaborative way to view, manage and respond to patient needs from anywhere and at scale – has been shaped by Practice feedback and is currently live in 254 Practices. As a fully interoperable system with the clinical EPR, eConsults are automatically matched to the patient and saved to the patient’s record as structured data.
Designed to help Practices manage the surge in demand since the pandemic, the inbox offers:
- Prioritisation Support – All eConsults are displayed in the Smart Inbox, supporting GPs in identifying which patients to respond to first. They can be sorted by age, number of flags and filtered by urgency or condition to help ensure patients are prioritised by clinical need, reducing time to treatment for the highest acuity patients.
- Reduced Reliance On Third Party Delivery Methods – eMail and other delivery methods for direct-to-GP contact have been known to be unreliable. With the Smart Inbox, the eConsult arrives within seconds of submission, speeding up time to treatment.
- Collaborative Working Options – the Smart Inbox enables practice teams to work together on both admin and clinical tasks such as long term condition management, appointment booking and organising vaccinations through team assignment and tagging tools.
- Faster Triage Services – Using the signposting tools, users are able to triage quickly, efficiently and safely. For example, the system will alert GPs automatically to what we call potential ‘red flags’, which are symptoms that suggest signs of something more serious going on, allowing the GP to make a fast decision about which patients need a same day appointment, avoiding delay in treating patients with urgent symptoms.
- Post Consultation Communication To Patients – the Smart Inbox enables GPs to message patients via SMS or email. These can be one-way messages, or messages that allow for a response such as requesting a photo. All correspondence is saved to the clinical record, allowing transparency between teams and a more seamless workflow.
As the company starts rolling out the free Smart Inbox upgrade to all customers, it continues to support practices with the transition with weekly Q&A sessions, Lunch & Learn webinars, and support with useful tips and tricks to help customers get the most out of the Smart Inbox.Recent sessions have covered: how to save admin time, tackle the 8am rush, implement modern General Practice, get ahead of the winter surge, manage Long Term Condition reviews and mitigate digital exclusion.
Dr Richardson at Forge Medical Practice in Sunderland, who has been using the Smart Inbox said: “The Smart Inbox automatically does a high-level triage process so that the patients we have needed to triage first, appear first. We no longer have to tell patients to call back. In fact, we’re now seeing more older patients than ever before who weren’t previously able to get an appointment in the 8am call queue. Our older patients are loving this because they can actually get their problems resolved with the clinician they want to see”.
Murray Ellender, Practising GP and CEO at eConsult comments: “As a practising GP myself, I understand the pressures that GPs face on a daily basis. Demand continues to outstrip capacity. And this means that it’s easy for patients who need to be seen quickly, to slip through the net. The traditional 8am phone call lottery to get an appointment often leaves patients unable to get an appointment when they need one, based on the order they sit within the phone-line queue. Submitting an eConsult online – or for those who need support using digital services, via the receptionist over the phone – ensures that GPs can respond to requests and direct patients to the right route of care, based solely on acuity and need. This gives patients a faster response rate and a quicker route to care, whilst helping GPs to streamline their workflow with one single view of everything, in one place. ”