NEW! Priority Recall Guides

June 29, 2022

The sun is shining and under normal circumstances GP practices would be using the Summer to catch up and prepare for the winter surge. Unfortunately things remain far from normal and demand is higher than general practice has ever seen before. Surgeries are adapting to unprecedented patient volumes, but the thought that ‘winter is coming’ is more ominous than ever. To make matters worse, the comforting quilt of QOF income protection has been snatched away, adding one more thing requiring attention to the top of the list.

Recalling patients for QOF, IIF or LES/DES should be well underway by now, with many patients needing multiple appointments and follow ups throughout the year to complete their investigations and treatments. Once your disease registers are up to date*, identifying those patients who need to be seen is easy enough, but how do you prioritise higher risk patients or patients requiring multiple interventions to the front of the queue?

As things stand…

Practices will often recall patients by birth month, alphabetically, or simply by starting with those who are known to be frequent visitors.

Practices understand the importance of prioritising patients for recall but are often at a loss about where to start. There is no simple way within either SystmOne or EMIS to easily highlight those patients at higher clinical risk than others, and therefore no way to determine who should be prioritised for recall over other, less urgent, patients.

Our solution

Seeing this challenge every day in their own clinical practice, our team of resident GPs and practice managers have come up with the Priority Recall Guide (PRG).

PRG uses an evidence-based algorithm which takes into account a large number of variables including comorbidities, frequency of steroid/antibiotic use, overdue medication (or clinical) reviews, smoking status and BMI. The system also takes into account all the specific work that needs to be done for the individual patient’s condition(s) (e.g. particular blood tests, medication reviews, or physical measurements like weight or blood pressure), and gives a total Priority Recall score. Higher scoring patients are prioritised for early recall. The practice has full visibility on why a patient has been flagged, enabling the practice to then plan the next steps.

Who does this benefit?

In short - everyone.

‍Practices benefit by minimising the number of times a patient needs to be recalled to deal with all of their QOF, IIF and LES/DES interventions, and from the peace of mind that comes from having a robust system to prioritise the most at-risk patients. Such patients, if left to be recalled by birth month or alphabetical order, might deteriorate, putting further strain on the practice and secondary care resources.

‍Patients benefit from timely reviews and subsequent interventions to help reduce the risk of complications or acute episodes relating to their condition(s).

‍The population benefits from freeing up more appointments, in turn improving access.

How much does it cost?

The Priority Recall Guides are completely free. That means that in addition to our best-in-class tool to find patients missing from disease registers, you also get a next generation tool to help you manage those conditions in the future.