This article is for PCNs who are interested in or have started trialling Accurx's Patient Triage Hub functionality.

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🗂 Index

Patient Triage Hub functionality supports GP practices to work in a joined-up way by enabling easy sharing of online consultation requests across multiple organisations. It's built to support practices to share work with one another (e.g. Enhanced Access), or with a specialised care team that works across multiple practices (e.g. pharmacy, mental health, physiotherapy).

⭐️ You must have Accurx Patient Triage in place to access the hub functionality. If you don't currently have access to it, click here to find out more and sign up for a free trial!

🏥 Use case 1: A practice assigns work to specialised care teams

Practice A receives a patient's request that is most appropriately dealt with by the mental health team working across the whole PCN. Practice A then assigns the request to a shared inbox where an authorised mental health team member can then view and action the request, for example, reply to the patient, send them a questionnaire, leave notes, attach NHS.uk information, or reassign the request to another member of the team.

Authorised team members can easily switch between practices A, B, C's inboxes to access and action any requests assigned to them from each of the practices they work with.

🏥 Use case 2: practice assigns requests to an out-of-hours services

Practice A receives several requests near the end of the week. They assign those requests to the shared inbox. Practice B is open on Saturday and can access the shared inbox to view and action those requests. Practice B can mark the requests as done or assign them back to Practice A with a note.

A step-by-step guide

If a request is most appropriately handled by a Hub team (e.g. physio team, mental health team), you can assign the request to the appropriate team by clicking the Assign button. On the drop-down list, you can find the Hub teams to assign the request to. Hub team names can be customised to support different hub-working settings.

The request you assigned to a Hub team will be moved to the "Shared" folder, which will then be accessible to authorised Hub members.

The rule of thumb here is - a request shared by a practice will stay in that practice's inbox. i.e. you can find the requests shared by Practice A in Practice A's inbox and requests shared by Practice B in Practice B's inbox etc.

To switch to a practice's inbox, click the organisation tab on the top left corner where you'll see a list of practices you have access to. Click on a practice's name, and it'll take you to their inbox. You can view and action the requests shared by that practice in their Shared folder.

You can switch between practices easily by just clicking on the dropdown menu. You can access and action shared requests across practices without having to log in to each one or connect to the clinical system.

You can action a shared request like you do a normal request - reply to a patient with an SMS, add a note to communicate with your colleagues or assign it to someone else. Once you action the request, you can clear it from the inbox by clicking on the 'Done' button.

In the case of enhanced access, a shared folder can be set up with a name that makes sense for participating practices. For example, "Enhanced access" or "Out of hours". Once set up, each participating practice will have the "Enhanced access" folder in their own practice inboxes. Practice A which operates out-of-hours can then access Practice B, C, or D's "Enhanced access" folders to view and action requests assigned by each practice.

The red box at the organisation tab indicates the count of new requests across the different organisations that might need your attention.

You can decide which folder you want to receive notifications for by switching on/off the Notifications toggle in that folder. Once you turn the notification on, any new request that comes into that folder will add to the number in the red box. Only those who have notifications switched on will get a notification of a new shared request.

If your PCN is using EMIS - you can only save a shared request to the record when you are connected to the EMIS where the patient is registered. If you cannot connect to the appropriate instance of EMIS, you can assign the request to someone who can allow them to save it to the record as needed.

⭐️ We will keep updating this article along the way. If you have any questions, thoughts, or feedback, please submit them via this link and we will get in touch: https://forms.gle/s5WDZiJQ98dXsSFD8