East Shore Partnership
eConsult Case Study
Key stats
- Patient List size: 14,500
- Launched: 3rd April 2018
- Model: Routine Clinic
Key messages:
- Spend time training your staff on how to use eConsult – it empowers them to help supports patients using it
- Continue to sell the benefits of eConsult to your patients – we also did lots of marketing before launch to prepare our patients
Our admin team at East Shore Partnership were inundated with phone calls at 8am every morning. We have always looked to find ways to give patients alternative ways to contact East Shore Partnership, but we wanted to find a way that fits their lifestyle needs whilst also allowing our receptionists to be able manage the call volume we were getting in the mornings.
With eConsult, we now import all eConsults that have come in overnight first thing in the morning, when the practice opens, and add these to our Duty team’s list. Any that come in during the day and just before closing are added to the duty list for the afternoon or the following day. This means that as practice we have a good idea of the volume of work our Duty team has the day before.
“My concern was reviewed by a GP within one working day and a time for a phone call with a GP was arranged at a time convenient to me. The GP rang within the time agreed and was very helpful, even making the appointment I needed for the same week.”
Patient
Key to making eConsult work for us was a fairly meaningful and thorough marketing and publicity exercise before launch. We quickly realised that the service was something that was going to work for our patients. Now we continue to sell the benefits to patients when they contact us. There are certain requests that we always ask patients to use eConsult for, in particular admin requests which can take a lot of pressure off our GPs, and to date we estimate we’ve saved over 3,800 appointments through the service.
“I would definitely recommend adding eConsult to any practice as a way of helping those patients that cannot make that phone call at 8am. For families, workers and carers it offers 24/7 access to our services which is superb.”
Practice Data Manager
As a practice we’ve made sure our patients know that we may respond by text, email or phone call – we even remind them to check their spam email just in case. By training our staff in how to use it, they feel confident and empowered to help patients. It also means they understand the patient perspective and can inform patients about the next steps from the practice perspective too. Our patients have definitely embraced eConsult and really value that we have given them more choice for contacting the practice, and we have saved many of them an unnecessary visit.
