On the morning of the first-ever HTN Digital Primary Care Conference, we welcomed Thomas Porteus, the Founder and CEO of Iatro Partners, for a session focusing on how GP practices can utilise their website to control, manage and shape demand.
The talk started with the main purpose of a practice website, Thomas said: “It’s about connecting and communicating with the patient, and we think by doing that in the right way, it gives you lots of benefits within the practice.”
Thomas went on to provide a general background on the company and the website platform for practices: “Practice365 was the first product we launched, and it was based on a long history of myself within primary care, working in digital and online services.
“We’ve been really lucky that now over 800 practices use the platform and as of last month we had over 11 million patients visit the websites in that time.”
The Iatro Practice365 solution lets users design their own website with a ‘drag and drop editor’, enabling them to build a website that meets up-to-date accessibility standards as well as share content easily. Thomas went on to say that Practice365 uses the NHS design standard, which is based on large NHS websites such as NHS 111.
Addressing the demand for high-quality practice websites, Thomas mentioned that one of the biggest challenges is finding how much traffic practices are getting through their website: “One of the crucial things that we talk a lot about, is that practices have a really good idea of how many people are coming through the door, and practices have a fairly good idea of who’s coming through on the phone system. The majority of people really don’t have a fantastic idea how many people are viewing the website.”
Thomas then went on to explain how Iatro optimised the tool for different devices: “We make sure that the website looks identical on both desktop and mobile. It reformats itself to make sure that you’ve got the best viewing experience possible. That’s really important, the majority of traffic we see now to the websites are coming from mobile devices.
“That’s quite interesting because when you look at most practices, they are publishing information from the desktop at the surgery and then viewing it on the desktop but actually most of that content is being consumed on mobile that requires some different tools to really make sure the content displays itself the best. I think we’ve done a really good job of doing that.”
The talk then went on to focus on new innovations, such as the use of voice assistants: “The interesting thing that I don’t think many organisations are really aware of is the growth in voice traffic. Voice traffic is content on websites found and understood by voice, so that could be Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, any of those tools. We’ve packaged all the content up on the website so that those digital assistants can understand the website content and present back to patients.”
The session closed with a great questions and answers section, discussing how practices can manage payments online and Thomas closed to showcase live examples of their customer websites, including Primary Care Doncaster, Central Lakes Medical Group and Poplars Medical Centre.
Watch the full presentation here:
