By Dr. Laura Malone GP and Co-Founder.
I have been running my own GP practice for over 12 years. My team and I are always looking for ways to improve our workflows. A key area of frustration is the amount of time spent in administrative work. We decided to audit this and what we found prompted us to look at how other GP surgeries worked. We compared ourselves to 20 other practices with over 100,000 patients.
It turns out we all have the same problems.
The first problem we identified is time spent on the telephone. My own practice generates over 100 phone calls per day. Each phone call lasts between 3 and 5 minutes. We found that for every 1000 patients 25 phone calls are generated per day. Looking at it more closely we found 65% of these phone calls were from patients trying to book/change/check appointment times. Approximately 15 % of telephone calls were for repeat prescriptions, 8% were requesting sick certs/letters, 8% were requesting advice and 4% were requesting results. Our admin staff are constantly having to context switch and firefight at the front line. This is all resource intensive repetitive work. To tackle this problem Myclinic365 developed intelligent virtual assistants that seamlessly integrate into existing workflow patterns. These intelligent virtual assistants allow patient engagement through the patient’s communication channel of choice – voice, web, mobile and social media. They are built specifically to give back the gift of time.
The second problem we identified is that doctors have no secure method of communication with patients. As a GP I generate large amounts of patient data every day. I need to communicate this information to my patients. This is always very time consuming.
Delivering results to patients can end up with repeated phone calls over several days or with letters being posted to patients. MyClinic365 has developed secure messaging which allows us to increase our productivity, efficiency, workflow accuracy and speed. It also empowers patients by increasing engagement and allowing them more control over their healthcare data.
The third problem we found is that there is currently little to no triage in general practice. Some practices employ nurses or even doctors to triage but, in most cases, appointments are given on a first come first serve basis. We have an aging population with 30 to 40% of the GP workforce set to retire in the next 5 years. Free GP care for all is coming. This will all lead to a dramatically increased demand for appointments putting increasing strain on the system. MyClinic365’s Triage using AI at first point of contact helps tackle this problem. AI bots have 530 million strings of knowledge versus 5 to 10 million in the average human. Collecting information via AI triage will help doctors save time and improve decision making capacity. It is not that doctors will be replaced by AI but that we will not have doctors working without AI. It will augment medical care and patients will expect us to use it.
MyClinic365 was created to improve doctors’ workflows and improve the workflows of clinical teams, to enhance the patient experience, increasing patient engagement and thus improving patient outcomes.
Our technology enables the human relationship and it allows us to take care of the unique human story at hand. After a lot of planning, research and work we are excited to be able to share MyClinic365 with you.
