I'm Rachel Kennouche, the practice manager for Boughton Health Centre in Chester. We
went live with online medical records access in February 2015.
"Morning"
I've always felt passionate about empowering patients on having access to their own medical
records. I did lots of planning and research. I then started to discuss that in the practice
with the clinicians and admin team. One of the first steps that I took with the
project was to engage with other practices that had already been utilising this for a
number of years. I was lucky that they shared protocols, best practice and top tips with
me.
This made it feel more manageable and it made it feel as though it was more achievable.
I researched using all the documents available, such as the NHS England guidance and the RCGP
guidance. They helped to establish a clear view of what was needed from the practice
perspective.
The next step of the project was to look at the roles and responsibilities of who would
manage some aspects of the project. And I felt it was important that we had a GP IT
lead, and that's Dr Ed Henry.
As the practice IT lead, I've been liaising and overseeing the documentation that the
management and administrative team have put together to enable patients to both apply
and gain access to their medical records.
I helped edit and draft the documentation, from a clinical perspective, to pick up on
things that the admin staff may not pick up on because of their non-medical background.
We've devised a really useful flow chart, which details each process in each stage.
It also explains who's responsible for each stage from start to finish, which is really
useful for all members of the team to use.
I engaged with the patient participation group quite early on in the project because I felt
that it was important to have their involvement with this.
In the run up to the project going live we did deliver lots of staff training sessions.
These were delivered with the reception and admin team on protected learning time and
coffee sessions. And we also did sessions for the clinical team and demoed how it would
look like from a patient's perspective.
In the run up to going live, I was responsible for the reception training. We introduced
new dialogue to the reception team and the clinical team.
We launched full online access to medical records in February 2015. Since this date
we do have regular team member update sessions and we also have sessions with clinicians
to promote the service and also raise awareness to continue promoting the service to patients.
We had an incredible response right from the start. Patients were really interested getting
access to their medical records and they were quite excited about it. We had quite a few
requests within the first few weeks.
"...record access please."
Therefore the turnaround within the first few weeks was going from between 2 and 4 weeks
before we would get each patient actually active. However now, with different sorts
of systems in place and the flow chart in place, we're now turning them around within
2 weeks.
"Brilliant, OK. Do you want me to fill this in now or do you want to bring it back?"
Now that the system is up and running, it seems to be running very smoothly and it has
very little impact on actual GP work. I might spend 5 or 10 minutes maximum on average on
a day dealing with finalising Patient Online access requests.
I'm really proud with the way the team has embraced the project. I do feel now that the
benefit to empower the patients and the decreased activity on the telephone lines is helpful
to the practice also.