NHS England report highlights how technology can support GP practices

GP practices in England have three patient access and management tools at their disposal:

• digital phone systems;
• online messaging; and
• modern triage, response and care navigation.

But statements earlier this month from NHS England suggest that only 10 - 15% of practices are using all three. Similar analysis from late 2022 revealed that almost half of practices are yet to transition to digital phone systems – relying instead on analogue systems that are set to be switched off by December 2025.

These findings are, however, unsurprising. More than half of the respondents to an FOI request made to 42 integrated care boards confirmed that their practices had not fully digitised patient records. Instead, GPs were still reliant on paper records stored in ‘Lloyd George’ brown paper envelopes.

Technology in frontline health services

The use of improved technologies is widely recognised as necessary for the effective management and improvement of frontline health services, and has been clearly identified as such in the NHS England primary care recovery plan (46 pages / 896KB PDF). Although the tabloid media regularly fulminates against patients not being able to see a GP face to face, in fact study after study has shown high degrees of satisfaction with remote consultations and better use of technology.

This is particularly true for patient groups for whom attending a GP surgery in person can be inconvenient - such as working people, parents of young children or people with mobility problems.

Encouraging adoption of technology

The healthcare sector has many bright and innovative businesses working on technologies to help deal with the current backlogs and access issues in primary care.  However, the widespread failure to replace ageing administrative techniques with even basic technological solutions is a barrier to adoption.

In order to change this, GP practices will require additional funding from the government to adopt technologies like digital phone systems, as well as practical assistance such as lists of appropriate and pre-assessed suppliers and systems – which is due to be published in July this year. NHS England has published a prior information notice – the first step towards a new framework for buying primary care IT and particularly aimed at making it easier for new  suppliers to offer their products and services to GPs.

At the same time, fresh regulatory measures could help to speed up compliance. Rules could require, for example, integrated care boards and GPs to create population health and planning data platforms and other business intelligence tools as a condition for providers.

The continuing shortage of GPs in practice in many areas also pushes this type of exercise down the list of immediate priorities. Despite this, a combination of these factors will be effective in setting the groundwork needed for taking full advantage of the great ‘healthtech’ products that are available.