myGP has rolled out its Patient Questionnaires to over 2,400 GP practices in order to help them capture patient information more efficiently.
Developed by iPLATO Healthcare, the new tool will help to simplify how GP practices capture and store their patient data. It also offers a solution for monitoring those who are at risk of developing health conditions or who are already living with one or more conditions.
The Patient Questionnaires deliver pre-set questions via a weblink enabled SMS or through the myGP app. They can be scheduled in advance and sent to groups of pre-selected patients. Results are then coded to patients’ medical records making it easy to keep track of when questionnaires were last completed.
Dr Preeti Shukla, NHS GP in East Lancashire said: “It’s vital that we continue to monitor those with long term conditions, but we must also reach those with currently undiagnosed high blood pressure and start their treatment programmes. The ability to contact large groups simultaneously without the need to manually input individual results is not only time saving for the practice, but also potentially lifesaving for patients.”
myGP is launching the tool with two pre-set questionnaires for BMI and blood pressure, with further questionnaires for smoking status, anxiety and depression, ethnicity and bespoke questionnaires following shortly.
Tobias Alpsten, CEO at iPLATO, added: “We’ve chosen to launch with Blood Pressure and BMI as we know, through conversations with our platform users, there is serious concern that failure to catch recent, lockdown-linked weight gain may create significant future complications for patients. Patient Questionnaires will offer instant insight into potential health risks and ensure patients are placed on treatment programmes sooner rather than later.
“As we continue to roll out increasingly targeted Patient Questionnaires, we hope to become the first port of call for those looking to review and measure patients remotely.”
The Patient Questionnaires are designed to make it easy for patients to use. It takes a matter for seconds for results measured at home or in a pharmacy (such as weight or blood pressure) to be entered. Patients are required to enter their date of birth as an identity check.
At the end of 2019, myGP was made available to all patients from practices using TPP SystmOne, joining the practices who already used the app with EMIS. The new tool is available to both EMIS and SystmOne users and complements an existing 2-way SMS solution already used for GP practice data collection.