Embedding Health Forms at Brownlow Health
Helps patients take active role in their care and saves two days of admin time per week
Overview
Brownlow Health is an inner-city GP practice in Liverpool. It has four different practice lists across seven different sites, offering GP services to around 85,000 patients, from a mixed demographic, across the city. It is one of 10 practices that make up the Central Liverpool Primary Care Network, which between them offer care to 125,000 patients.
Brownlow Health started working with Blinx Healthcare three years ago, with an initial focus on supporting data analytics. Blinx Healthcare now provides a full package of support through PACO, their healthcare management and patient engagement platform, which includes Quick Send messaging, patient recall, digital front-door consultations and health forms.
“Implementing Blinx PACO has been very helpful, we had used our previous online consultation platform for many years and were anxious about making the switch. The support from the team at Blinx, as well as the intuitive system and ease of design and operation of PACO, made the process straightforward and has given us the opportunity to improve our processes to work more efficiently, saving staff time which we can utilise for further improvements in patient care.”
Dr Ian Pawson, GP Partner, Brownlow Health
What was the Issue?
Recent data analysis showed that GPs were using most of their appointment time asking patients for information which could have been collected beforehand, meaning valuable consultation time was being lost.
Staff were also spending significant time processing requests for repeat asthma medication and check-ups, which fell regularly at set intervals, so were simple to predict.
What was the Solution?
Blinx Healthcare worked with staff at Brownlow Health to identify the information that would be useful for staff to know before an appointment. This information then formed the basis of a patient registration form. The bespoke form included information relevant to their patient demographics, such as gender and homelessness.
The patient would complete the online form, and batches would be sent to the practice for review. The practice saves time, and the information is automatically saved to the practice’s patient record system.
In the same way, Blinx Healthcare developed an asthma annual review health form based on the nationally-recognised asthma control test (ACT).
In addition to ACT’s five questions to identify the current level of asthma control, reflected from the patient’s memory over the past four weeks, the new form also collects other important details to better inform individual asthma care.
Forms are triaged from a shared health form inbox and appointments are booked directly into the EPR, saving time and duplication. This ensures that those at low risk can be reviewed remotely, while flagging high risk patients for in-person review. Patients can be seen by the right team member, such as a respiratory specialist nurse, GP, or practice nurse, maximising use of skills across the team.
This health form is reviewed by a clinician and is automatically saved into the EPR, with appropriate coding.
Impact & Benefits
The benefits of health registration forms have been immediately apparent since their launch in September 2023 including:
An average of 800 forms completed by patients each week during peak university registration season
A 63% conversion rate (4,777 of 7,582 forms returned)
Average of 2 days each week saved over 23 weeks (it previously used to take four minutes for staff to complete the forms)
Significant benefits have been shown following the introduction of asthma review forms, including:
Patients can complete the health form, at a time that suits them
Improved triage of asthma reviews, allowing patients to be seen by the most appropriate clinician
Total of 4.5 clinical hours saved each week
A 15% increase in completed asthma reviews leading to improved quality performance
Local Quality Improvement Scheme targets met in full
Improved responses from children and non-English-speaking patients
Next Steps, Sustainability & Scaling
A major benefit of the approach taken for asthma is that it can be scaled or replicated for any long-term condition, provided that the right questions are input into the form – PACO can do the rest. The potential time savings, increase in productivity and improved use of appointment time to focus on clinical issues are significant.
Brownlow Health and Blinx Healthcare have a comprehensive plan for further digital improvements and have begun building on these initial improvements with the following:
The previous online consultation platform has now been replaced with PACO’s Digital Front Door, enabling patients to book online appointments, video consultations, and access to health information via the practice website, avoiding the phone queue.
Plans are in place to replace current patient SMS/Email communication platform with Quick Send messaging to gain further benefits of being incorporated into one platform
Full Long Term Condition recall roll out 2024-25 to improve efficiency of the recall process, have an improved bespoke approach to recall, and improve quality performance.
Medication review Quality Improvement Plan to improve rates of comprehensive medication review, with focus on those on mental health medications.
Patient-initiated follow-up, meaning patients can request a follow-up appointment as and when needed, freeing up appointments for those that need them and reducing no-shows.
Takeaway Tips from Dr Pawson, GP Partner at Brownlow Health
The opportunities with using Blinx Health Forms are very broad, and only limited by your imagination and priorities for your patient cohort. The ability to design bespoke forms to match the needs of your population and practice is very helpful. Being able to set alarms to highlight responses that need more urgent action is helpful, and means that forms can be reviewed quickly and effectively, with a high level of safety build into the system.
Having the ability to send ad hoc messaging to patients from within the same system to enable the team to function from one platform, rather than multiple, is also very attractive and will reduce our reliance on multiple systems.
Examples
- Data accuracy and interpretation needs to be as clear as possible. Decisions concerning patient care are largely based on these numbers, which affects their lives and survivability
- Engage early. The challenges presented by the system working at scale require early engagement of all partners
- Consider and communicate the added value of taking action at scale across a large population with multiple partners