GP Connect Send Document and the PHL group

PHL Group runs Integrated Urgent Care in Hampshire across 50 GP practices, an essential primary care service serving 1.7 million patients. They provide telephone clinical assessment, out of hours home visiting services and some face-to-face primary care appointment services. The organisation is also able to offer acute and primary care services.

Providing an effective and efficient service is a high priority for PHL Group. Providing timely and detailed updates to a patient’s GP on the outcomes of a care encounter is important for patient safety and good clinical care. With a mix of different clinical systems across the practices PHL Group serve, the process for doing this had been recognised as time-consuming and labour intensive.

Typically, when a patient had been seen outside their registered practice as part of Extended Access provision, the practice would create and send a task to one of the three Hubs that PHL Group operate. The Hub would then create a discharge document from the clinical system, look up the practice email address and email the discharge or consultation summary to the GP practice. This would take at least 5 minutes per consultation.

The practice would then have to manage the email into their nhs.net account so that it could be migrated into the practice clinical system, matched with the patient, and added to that their record. This would take between 3 and 5 minutes per consultation.

The introduction of NHS Digital's GP Connect: Send Document has transformed the way PHL Group can update GP practices on consultations taking place for extended access.

GP Connect: Send Document makes it simpler for information to be shared across systems, for clinicians to deliver improved care and to minimise administration time and effort.

Users can: 

• create and send a PDF consultation summary of care encounters held outside of the registered GP Practice to replace time-consuming methods like printed letters, NHS mail or fax 
• transfer Consultation Summaries across secure infrastructure directly into the patient's registered practice system, for addition to the patient record by the registered GP Practice 

Following the enablement of GP Connect: Send Document for PHL Group the consultation update is sent automatically within 3 hours of the consultation finishing.

This saves administration time in the Hub of at least 5 minutes per patient which represents a morning’s work for one member of staff. It also means there are no spikes in paperwork following weekends and bank holidays where backlogs could take time to clear.

This has freed up time for an administrator to do other tasks such as referrals or prescriptions for example.

So far, GP Connect: Send Document has been deployed for one of the two clinical systems in use at PHL Group where sharing of consultation data was predominantly manual  But even where the process is mostly automated for another clinical system, GP Connect: Send Document will still simplify and save some time.

For practices, 3-5 minutes time is saved on administration for each discharge as the consultation summary arrives matched to the patient record.

Another benefit of GP Connect: Send Document is that there's a reduction in the volume of phone calls and emails between Hubs and practices due to the automation of the process. For example, GP Connect: Send Document will automatically provide an update when a test or referral had been ordered as a follow up to the original consultation. Previously this would often be followed up by the patient’s practice.