Healthengine customers since their foundation in 2015, Generations Family Practice signed up for Recalls in January 2023 and instantly felt relief from the biggest pressure on their team. Over those first three months, 1,888 recalls were sent automatically via SMS, phone and letter, saving up to 30 hours of admin time and removing all the stress of manual handling.
”“With our recalls and bookings taken care of, we’re not overwhelmed. In the first three months, it’s saved us about 30 hours that we’ve been able to channel into taking good care of our patients,” says Eve. “And because the recalls are automatically scheduled so they’re not sent all at the same time, there’s less risk of the phones all ringing at once!”
EvePractice Manager
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.”
Saving up to 30 hours, and counting, on recall messages alone
With 90% of patients who receive recalls booking an appointment with Generations Family Medical Practice, it’s massively reduced the team’s workload and stress load. “With our recalls and bookings taken care of, we’re not overwhelmed. In the first three months, it’s saved us about 30 hours that we’ve been able to channel into taking good care of our patients,” says Eve.
“And because the recalls are automatically scheduled so they’re not sent all at the same time, there’s less risk of the phones all ringing at once!”
How has Recalls changed the patient experience?
“Healthengine has done a really good job of creating flexibility and autonomy to customise schedules and templates so they fit our practice and meet compliance. We’re very happy with it, and our patients don’t notice the difference since we switched to automating recalls.”
More paperless time-saving opportunities
Being a new practice meant lots of new patients, and as their practice has grown, so has their appreciation for the digital new patient form.
“We have a QR code at reception to keep new patient forms paperless. Once patients have completed the form we just go into the system and copy and paste. No labour-intensive typing. No in-putting errors. And we can double-check any details with the patient if something doesn’t look right.”
Always someone on the other end of the line
Timely support from our team is something a lot of Healthengine customers value highly, and that reliability has been a constant for Generations Family Practice since 2015.
“I can get in touch with our dedicated customer success manager at the click of a button. And even if I have to leave a message, she always calls me back. And she can log in immediately, look at the issue I’m looking at and find the solution.”
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