Is your GP surgical treatment equipped for the digital future?

Appointments that you can make on the web, although even now in your pyjamas. Repeat prescriptions that can be ordered in the exact same way. Secure accessibility to your personal health-related information from your laptop. The option for a consultation over the internet via Skype. And, when you do need to pop into the doctor’s surgery in individual, appropriate Wi-fi, so that you can download the latest podcasts about healthful living, browse consultant appointments on NHS Selections, and book them, also, prior to you go house.

The potential of GP solutions is as considerably about accessibility for patients as freeing up physicians so they have far more time to care, says Beverley Bryant, director of strategic systems and engineering at NHS England. “We want the NHS to be easier to do company with, for ordinary citizens,” Bryant explains. “We want to enhance accessibility and make people’s experiences far better.”

Some GP practices are even more down the modernisation path than other individuals. When it comes to on the web appointments and repeat prescriptions, 55 per cent of practices already offer the companies.

But patient records are not virtually as accessible. Only 1.6 per cent of practices supply this, says Bryant. “We want to boost that but the services has to be thought by means of. It is one particular thing logging into your records to see your medicine background, or what allergies have been listed by your title, but we don’t want patients spotting a new check end result has popped up and trying to decipher it just before their personal medical professional has a chance to. Especially as the outcome may possibly be complicated or critical. We really don’t want to be concerned men and women.”

But she emphasises that all these new technologies are readily offered – “and we want to use them, to bring the NHS up to same level of technical advancement as the rest of society”.

Any person who attends the Expo is instantly enrolled in the “pop-up university”, a programme of healthcare lectures, workshops and seminars. Also creating his debut will be EgBot, an engaging animated character that exhibits the new on the internet world of health and care from the patient’s perspective.

There will also be a assortment of interactive sessions and presentations at the Dementia Café, whose informal coffee-store setting replicates a countrywide campaign by the Alzheimer’s Society to offer you suggestions and help for people impacted by dementia in a social setting – namely, above a cuppa.

By meeting as several healthcare professionals as achievable at events this kind of as Expo 2014, Bryant and her group hope to make the NHS fitter for the potential – and 1 that is a better fit with patients’ more and more on the internet lives. “We have to seem at it from a buyer service perspective,” she says. “The NHS need to be a lot less difficult to use – without it getting a trauma.”

The Well being and Care Innovation Expo 2014 runs these days and tomorrow at the Manchester Central Convention Centre. For a lot more specifics, pay a visit to healthcareinnovationexpo.com

Is your GP surgical treatment equipped for the digital future?