Aim of this toolkit
- Reduction in average GP administration time from 60 min/day to 5 min/day.
- Upskill and enhance the roles of non-clinical staff
About EZ Doc
“The strength of British General Practice is its personal response to a dedicated patient list, its weakness is its failure to develop consistent systems that free up time and resources to devote to improving care for patients”
Simon Stevens, CEO NHS England. (GP Forward View, April 2016)
Reducing GP workload and increasing time available for patient care is now a national imperative. The GP Forward View document states that there is a need to reduce unnecessary practice workload to free up valuable clinical resources. Effective document management can help address some of these challenges.
A growing frustration amongst AT Medics staff with the number of documents received and the time it took to process them, led to a review of the business process. The improved model has enabled a 90% reduction in the number of documents that GP’s need to review, thus releasing valuable GP time.
Major challenges facing Primary Care
as described in NHS England, Improving General Practice: A Call to Action April 2016
- an ageing population, growing co-morbidities and increasing patient expectations, resulting in a 95% growth in consultation rate
- growing dissatisfaction with access to services
- growing reports of workforce pressures including recruitment and retention problems.
Potential problems with current document management processes
- Unmanageable growth in number of documents
- Multiple routes in which documents are received into the practice leading to possible duplication
- Lack of consistency in the manner in which documents are processed
- Non-standardised clinical coding processe