GP Practice Montgomery-House Surgery in Bicester has connected its telephone system with EMIS.
Steve Sharpe, Practice Manager said “We could only have eight phone calls going on at once. We could have gone to 30 through ISDN, but we would have had to pay a premium. Now, with Surgery Connect, we can have an unlimited number of lines, and use features such as call queuing and call recording to help improve patient access and better manage how we deal with calls.”
The Surgery became one of the first GP surgeries to link calls to patient details held on EMIS.
Steve continued “This has helped to smooth out the process of how the practice handles incoming and outgoing calls, and provided GPs with more efficient ways of managing patient communication.”
When people dial in, Surgery Connect automatically presents patient-facing staff with the patient record associated with the phone number as a pop up on their screen. Previously, they would have to ask who the caller was, and manually search EMIS to check their identity. Now, all that information is one place, saving time in processing the call.
If someone calls from a shared number, such as a home landline, the receptionist is presented with options on who the caller might be, and can ask them their date of birth and other details to confirm their identity.
Staff can also use the system to call or text the patient, by dialing directly from the record on the screen.
Steve continued.“If a patient wants same day access to a GP, they call in and are added to a triage list. The GPs can then work through this list using the patient details in front of them, and call the patient back using the phone number they want to be used. They don’t have to go through each patient record manually to find the number, and then guess which number to use.”.
