Charged with delivering more collaborative, integrated healthcare services, primary care networks (PCNs) aim to bring together GP practices with services in the community and secondary care – enhancing collaboration between multidisciplinary teams, and offering patients more straightforward access to a wider range of services.
The demand for reactive care often presents challenges for primary care teams, many of which aren’t collecting the essential information needed from patients at point of enquiry to appropriately triage their enquiries.
This often means that GPs must deal with a large volume of appointments which may be unnecessary, or which could be more cost-effective if handled by a different team member. The lack of alignment around clinical pathways and ways of working between practices within a PCN may mean opportunities for cross-PCN collaboration are limited – particularly where teams are using different systems or tools for managing patient triage and flow.
A hub model of triage offers the most straightforward approach to bring together services and streamline patient flow management and collaboration between multidisciplinary teams.
Designed to foster integrated primary and community care within PCNs, the hub model centralises triage decisions for patient enquiries across a network, offering clear, consistent care pathways for patients, regardless of at which practice they register their initial enquiry.
Crucially, this model also enables teams to manage follow-up care across the network and take advantage of all available clinical capacity – including in other practices – to cope with surges in demand.
Digital plays a critical role in enabling effective hub-working for PCNs. In streamlining patient referrals and coordination of care between services, digital tools like Klinik’s AI triage and patient streamlining reduces the friction between different providers and ensures rapid collection and sharing of information needed to overcome barriers.
Klinik’s triage hub can connect clinicians across a network and patient’s enquiries can be accessed by teams regardless of which practice or service they’re based in. Klinik helps PCNs to co-ordinate patient care and streamline access to a wide range of services across the geographical area.
With AI-assisted patient-history taking providing triage teams with the information needed to make rapid, accurate care decisions, Klinik makes triage and patient flow management more efficient. With all enquiries triaged in a single system, Klinik ensures equitable access to care for patients across the network.
Thanks to the insights contained within the dashboard, PCN managers also have greater oversight of demand and capacity across the network, both at the current time and over a period of months. As a result, they are better able to make decisions on the staffing and resources necessary to ensure patient access within current funding – while also being able to create space for proactive care, too.
By embracing these technological innovations, PCNs can enhance service delivery; ensuring patients receive timely, co-ordinated care.
If you’d like to discuss how Klinik could help your PCN to benefit from a hub-model approach to triage, get in touch with our team to find out more.
Contact Kristiaan van Driem, Head of Sales & Marketing, Klinik Healthcare Solutions,
kristiaan.vandriem@klinik.co.uk
https://klinikhealthcaresolutions.com
www.linkedin.com/company/klinik-group