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The Doctor Will See You Now Online Surgeries Today and Tomorrow

ByEmily

Nov 20, 2017 #GP, #health

Online GP consultations have been hot news recently, with £45m being offered by NHS England to support adoption of such systems in GP surgeries. Critics, however, yet believe there will be very little gain from the implementation and minimal reduction of temporal burden on doctors and waiting patients alike. Nonetheless, thirty six practices in the West of the country have already adopted the online system under observation and with beneficial results. Over a period of fifteen months, 38% of online submissions of symptoms led to a face-to-face consultation, 32% to a telephone consultation, and the remainder were deemed fit enough to stay at home and not needlessly sit in a waiting room for the doctor have to make time to see them to no effect.

Modern Day Medicine

These are positive outcomes. Using an online consultation system reduces administrative burden on practices, doing away with the need for patients and employees to come in requesting fit notes, as well as minimising the flow of those patients purely coming in for repeat prescriptions which don’t need a follow-up check-up. Nevertheless, it is another IT system for staff to become familiar with, increasing primary care workload and costs. Further, only two in 1,000 people per month use the online system as yet, with the lowest usage being out of hours and at the weekend. Of these, most were female (64.7%) and between twenty-five and forty-four years of age. Online consultations clearly have a place in the modern day doctors’ surgery, but it seems more effective marketing of their benefits is needed.

Digital Diagnosis

However, perhaps an amelioration of the system itself is yet in order, also. It is early days, after all. For instance, those submissions that led to face-to-face consultations were mostly new conditions, rather than pre-existing conditions, leaving room for error in diagnosis. Furthermore, subsequent face-to-face appointments tended to be longer than ordinary visits. It therefore seems logical to make the online consultation system a digital face-to-face consultation in the first place. VideoDoc is a great example of this. Although this roundabouts the purpose of the system regarding doctors’ time in some sense, it does give back confidence to patients that their described symptoms are properly diagnosed, as they can be visually and auditorily demonstrated at the first stage of reporting them.

A Sustainable System for Tomorrow

The online consultation system now supports in some capacity 350 practices throughout the country, suggesting a full scale, UK-wide implementation soon. This, no doubt, because of its aid in making practices more sustainable in view of an increased population and only so many hours in a day. Nonetheless, such online systems will never succeed if more people don’t utilise them. In an age when internet users look up their symptoms online before contacting a GP, it seems strange that so few people choose to use the online consultation system. Practices sorely need to market the benefits of online diagnosis, both for patient and doctor.

By Emily