It’s very well publicised that GP practices need to be achieving more with less resources. The sheer volume of admin never seems to go in any direction other than up and budgets are squeezed ever more tightly, all against the backdrop of growing patient lists and increasingly complex and demanding care delivery.

As a result, more and more practices are looking for ways to streamline admin and save money by automating processes – including recall systems. In a nutshell, practices are automating all aspects of patient recall, enabling them to identify patients, communicate with them and audit all the contact made with them. This helps practices to save money, improve efficiency and improve the quality of care provided to patients.

Automated recall

This topic has been discussed in detail on the Practice Index forum recently, complete with plenty of examples of how practices have automated their recall systems. One poster said that they have set up a suite of searches for the year, including some data quality searches stuck in with the recalls, using EMIS Web.

Helpfully, the PM shared a process that, despite still being fine-tuned, is working well for the practice. More details and a handy flowchart can be found here.

Another PM added that when you create searches in EMIS you can set a schedule for them to run automatically on a given date – repeatedly, one offs or with a maximum number, which is really useful for recall searches. They added that when you create the search it’s a case of checking the parameters that you use – there are several options that will define the search period, from a particular date, or a week/month/year etc before the search date. “If you can use this feature then it can remove the need for having to update the search criteria,” the PM said. “A combination of scheduled runs and specified search periods (for example, running every month and searching for codes etc. in the previous month) might mean you don’t need to alter anything one you have your baseline.”

Help and advice

The forum thread – click here to access it – is well worth a read as it contains loads of helpful advice and examples.

For example, one PM outlined how, when you create searches, it pays to get them in the right month order. This can be achieved by starting the title with an alphabet letter – for example aJanuary, bFebruary, cMarch and so on. Otherwise, EMIS puts them into a ‘true’ alphabet order. Alternatively you could use numbers provided you have less than 10). Automation of processes works best when it’s both logical and information is easy to find – doing the above makes it easier to read and search for information should manual intervention be required.

Dealing with clinicians

A common issue regarding automated recall systems (and admin in general, but that’s one for another day) is that clinicians ‘disrupt’ systems by incorrectly entering or amending data. Automated procedures can be disrupted when clinicians don’t move diary entries on and people appear on the list that shouldn’t be there, or don’t appear when they should.

In response to a question about how to deal with this scenario, one PM responded by saying: “We also have searches to highlight out of date diary dates. Some of these may be because the patient DNAs or cancelled online and no-one informed administration, but if it is because the clinician didn’t move the diary date back task them with it, log it and deal with it in their PDR. We found they soon get the message and after starting out with over 5,000 out of date diaries I am down to only a few.”

Success leads to success?

The overwhelming majority of practice managers we’ve spoken to about automated recall systems say they have saved considerable amounts of time. What’s more, as with most forms of process automation, the bigger the practice list, the bigger the benefits it seems.

Interestingly, it seems that in many cases automating queries also leads to more automation of the actual recall messaging – with many practices switching to recall by text and email instead of traditional post.

A practice manager told us: “We used to manage recall by sending out letters, which was expensive – post, stationery, print and time all added up – so we switched to electronic communication in most cases. It did take us some time to find out which software was best for our needs – this can vary from practice to practice I think – and we had to do a data collection and cleansing exercise (in line with GDPR, of course!), but it has been worth the investment. The most time-consuming thing for us was to ensure the emails clearly got the message across about exactly what patients needed to do. Clear, concise, plain English is very much the order of the day.

“Our system fully integrates with our clinical system so we can send patients reminders and cancel appointments too, as well as send voice messages and emails. It has been well worth the setup time and effort.”

Automating processes such as recalls can save a practice a lot of time and money so are well worth looking at – there’s a definite return on investment waiting for you.

What tips can you share when it comes to setting up automated recall systems and queries? What other processes have you automated? Let us know below or take the conversation to the Practice Index forum here.

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