Software company Accurx has launched its free Accumail feature nationally to primary care users in order to help GPs communicate more easily with other healthcare providers.
GP practices can use Accumail to quickly and easily find and contact any other healthcare professional about a patient, e.g. for quick patient referrals to community, pharmacy, mental health and other care settings where e-Referral Service (e-RS) isn’t supported, or for advice and guidance.
This is a step change from the system-hopping and duplication of cross-network conversations that GP staff are used to, which is time-consuming and often doesn’t give assurance that messages have been received, or provide clear audit trails with visibility of ongoing conversations.
Accumail joins up care communication for Integrated Care Systems and Primary Care Networks to support more efficient and seamless patient flow across care settings. It can be launched straight from the Accurx toolbar – for simple and secure conversations that let users save to and attach from the patient record.
The core benefits of Accumail include:
Easily finding the right contact across NHS services – Accumail’s search function helps users find staff and specialties across primary, secondary and community care settings with visibility of active contact details, and allows them to send messages straight to a recipient’s NHS inbox so that nothing gets missed.
Quick, integrated communication – eliminating the system-hopping and duplication from conversations between healthcare professionals, letting users save messages securely to the patient’s record with one click and attach documents directly from the record.
Shared ownership of care with no blind spots – Accumail makes it easier to collaborate and spread the workload with a shared inbox, clear audit trails and visibility of ongoing conversations that mean any member of a team can get the overview they need at a glance.
Accumail acts as a natural extension to current workflows and requires little to no time on training or implementation for practice staff to start seeing benefits. It supports NHS improvement targets for patient experience, ease of access and demand management within General Practice.
Satya Raghuvanshi, head of clinical, Accurx said: “The NHS’s 1.4 million employees spend a considerable amount of time trying to coordinate patient care across the NHS. Outdated systems and fragmented communication channels make this unnecessarily complex and ultimately, impact the delivery of care and contribute to a poor patient experience.
“Practices are already using this new feature to improve their workflows, for example referring patients to pharmacies for their blood pressure checks or requesting advice and guidance from specialists. Accumail is part of our broader vision to connect everyone involved in a patient’s care, and is an important part of delivering integrated care across the NHS.”
Accumail is the most recent product launch from Accurx. In January, Accurx introduced a targeted appointment-booking feature that has since proved popular with GP surgeries and patients.