Last week through a live webinar, we heard from Kieran Waterston, Head of Sales at iPlato Healthcare. The webinar focused on a digital first primary care and how the mygp platform is being used to help the COVID-19 pandemic.
You can watch a recording of the webinar here:
Kieran Waterston said “We normally have 5 million to 10 million transactions on our system on a regular basis, now we have up to 25 million transactions within our network during the COVID-19 crisis.”
“Video and remote consultations were launched in March when the coronavirus outbreak happened. We’ve seen a fourfold increase in people looking at it (myGP app) to actively using it.”
Kieran goes on to describe the myGP app and what is behind the platform.
“The myGP app is what the patients connect to. Then there is the myGP platform that practices connect to. There are lots of different elements with the first being ‘practice messaging’. Secondly, there is ‘preGP’ which is our patient signposting product, which allows patients to be signposted and navigated to resources they need. Thirdly, there is ‘remote consultation’ which is essentially video consultation. Fourthly, the ‘engagement hub’ allows us to reach out and broadcast messages at scale. Fifthly, the ‘remote consultation enterprise solution’ allows for video consultations to be done at a much wider scale.”
“Finally, we also have partners that we work with so that other providers and commissioners can have a broad reach to all of their patients.”
New launches
Kieran describes the new developments to the myGP app and associated plug-in features.
Remote Patient Monitoring
“We are acutely aware that there are times when you need patients to capture information.”
For this, Kieran explains that the solution is called ‘remote patient monitoring’ which is controlled by the practice. It allows for practice staff to ‘switch on’ monitoring of patients symptoms, so if a patient as suspected Covid-19 they could be asked to plot their temperature a number of times and those readings will be shown to the clinician.
“This plug-in for myGP allows the practice to monitor core body temperature of the patient, as well as heart rate, respiratory rate and oxygen saturation.”
“This is being rolled out for free to all existing and new iPLATO customers for six months to help primary care to continue to manage its patients the best way that they can.”
“This is also really useful at the moment for patients who would often have regular check ups for their vital stats, they can now do these at home and the GP or practice nurse can review them without putting the patient or themselves at risk.”
myGP Buddy
“This links the clinician to patient messaging directly from the medical record. So a clinician can quickly and easily send necessary information to a patient.”
“It also gives you the ability to send a message to a patient to simply conduct a video consultation. It is a temporary free service to get us through this current crisis period where the patient doesn’t have to have the app downloaded to use it.”
Updates to existing services
Kieran explains what updates have been applied to current products to tackle problems associated with the COVID-19 outbreak.
Remote Consultation
“We have launched this in 340 practices this month with over 1000 clinicians having access to it. You have the ability to send two-way messages to gather information and you can also invite patients to conduct video consultations.”
Appointment Triage
“All appointments can be seen on one screen with this feature with the option to video call with one click. Clinicians and practice staff can easily triage appointment reasons and either move appointments over to another member of MDT or send a two-way message to gather further information prior to an appointment.”
“For the patients that don’t have the app, you can invite them to download it here. We’ve enhanced this module quickly; so that patients can be triaged all from one screen.”
preGP
This is the ‘Intelligent Care Navigation’ of the patient through the system.
“What we want is for the patient to go on and attempt to book an appointment, we then capture information, to go on to signpost the patient to other services which may be relevant to them.”
“Patients are signposted to alternate points of care based on appointment reason entered. Essentially, this stops patients arriving at a surgery unnecessarily.”
