We’re delighted to inform you today of the open access publication from Abi Eccles et al:
“BJGP: Patient use of an online triage platform”
It’s the first independent study of askmyGP and it’s well worth reading in full. I will quote the conclusion briefly:
“Patterns-of-use and patient types were in line with typical contacts to GP practices. Though the age of users was broad, highest levels of use were from younger patients. The perceived advantages to using online triage, such as convenience and ease of use, are often context dependent.”
What comes through for me is the very ordinariness of the online demand. It’s the same as normal demand, same patients, same conditions, same frequency by day of week and time of day.
There’s more on patient feedback too, with themes extracted which are very familiar to us. We’ve quantified the age question in our study on “Age specific adoption of online consultations.”
What this study adds is online usage orders of magnitude greater than any previous paper, with 5447 patient episodes from 9 practices in 10 weeks. Data collection was May to July 2017, which was our previous version 2 platform. Since then the same principles have been carried forward to v3 with a new design and many more features. Growth in usage means that we are now collecting the same volume of data roughly every two days.
The scope for further research is increasing daily with an anonymised database of some 300,000 episodes, unique in general practice. If you’re an academic in the field, we welcome the opportunity to collaborate, particularly on studies of the GP practice as a whole, not just online components.
Benefits for patients and GPs are the product of system change.
Regards,
Harry Longman
PS See how patients interact with askmyGP on our Bramley Demo Practice.
To experience the GP side, start with our free online demo.
