Healthengine Recalls relieves the biggest daily stress for Generations Family Medical Practice

Generations Family Medical Practice 3 month snapshot^

• Recalls sent – 1,888 attempts (includes SMS, phone and letter)
• Recall appointments attended – 460
• Time savings – Approx. 30 hours saved with Recalls alone
• Reminders – 1,287 sent, 747 confirmed
• My Care Team™ – 33 patients added the practice to My Care Team™
• Free profile search appearances – 2,269
• Free profile views – 224
• Clicks to reveal phone – 19
• Clicks to website – 15
• Reviews on Google – 4.5
• Clicks to website – 15

^From stats over 3 months (Jan-Mar 2023)

Generations Family Practice has provided quality, affordable and accessible health care to the growing multicultural community of Croydon Park in Adelaide since 2015. Starting with a team of just two, Dr. Maxwell Lartey and Practice Manager Eve, they joined Healthengine right from the get-go. Today, they‘re now operating with three GPs, two nurses, two receptionists, two office admin staff, a casual general assistant and a growing suite of patient services.

“Dr. Lartey wanted to establish a paperless practice, enable online bookings and minimise manual admin work that can take up valuable time for a small team like ours,” says Eve. “So my first task when I came on board as practice manager was to research the smartest, most efficient and cost-effective systems for handling that smoothly.”

“Healthengine stood out as the best partner for online bookings, automated booking updates and patient reminders,” says Eve. “And integration with our Best Practice management software means all our patient bookings are synced, and all our reminders are handled automatically. That saves us a huge amount of time”

Manual recalls create biggest stress

For years, the way the Generations’ admin team had been handling recalls was by logging in to Best Practice every day, clicking on every patient requiring a recall and sending a message manually. That was taking an average of 20 to 30 minutes per day – two to three hours per week – just to send out recall messages, not including the time required to book the appointment. 

“That’s a lot of labour and too much precious time spent on just sending messages. But more than that, it was putting a huge amount of pressure on our team to attend to them manually. Recalls are such a high-risk area. You can’t just let them build up if you hit a busy period. For compliance and risk management, it’s absolutely critical they’re handled in a timely manner, every day,” says Eve.

“To manage our time and ensure the recalls always got done, our team would log on and handle all the messages in one go. That often meant all the phones would start ringing at once! So we’d always have that pressure every day, juggling time and timings. If I do it now, the phone will ring. If I don’t do it now, I may end up not doing it on time!”

Keeping all the admin balls in the air, with enhanced automation 

When their dedicated Healthengine customer success manager recommended automating all those key repetitive processes like reminders and recalls with Practice Efficiency Suite Plus, now part of the GP Complete subscription. Eve instantly saw the potential for reducing stress, while still keeping patients informed and staying in control.

Practice Efficiency Suite Plus, now part of the GP Complete subscription allows the team to fully realise their paperless practice goals and choose their level of automation. That means they can now capture bookings from the Generations Family Medical Practice website, as well as Healthengine, share digital new patient forms, enable self-check-ins for patients and rapidly process those time-intensive SMS appointment reminders and recall messages automatically.

“Our recalls are now all running in the background. Any time results come in, Healthengine Recalls automatically sends a message to the patient,” says Eve.

“It records how many times it’s sent the message. It tracks appointment bookings and automatically removes those patients from the recall list. And if the patient has not yet responded it goes straight into a bucket that’s marked for our attention when we log in to the system.

“It means we can focus on juggling all the other admin balls to provide the best patient experience with complete peace of mind, knowing that the recalls are taken care of.”