Focusing your efforts with Abtrace

Automating recall so you can focus on those most in need

The Problem

Diabetes is one of the biggest healthcare challenges in the UK, with over 4.4 million people in the UK living with the condition and a further 1.2 million people suspected to be undiagnosed. All of these patients require monitoring to ensure they are as healthy and safe as possible – blood tests, medication reviews, eye screening… and of course, foot checks. Foot checks can be fiddly – patients need to have them done at least annually, and many GP practices find keeping on top of this can be challenging, especially with such high caseloads. One of our clients adopted our Automated Recall feature to manage their foot checks, and found impressive response rates – here’s how 👉.

The "Traditional" Approach

Similar to many practices, our clients were using a traditional mixture of manual searches and pop-up reminders to complete their foot checks. Methods used included:

Encouraging clinical staff to check pop ups and carry out foot checks when seeing patients.
Searching for patients in EMIS or SystmOne who are overdue a foot check and individually contact these patients.
Running recall campaigns by calling patients and sending bulk SMS messages and letter reminders.

The Abtrace Approach

Our client chose to adopt Abtrace’s Automated Recall to proactively find the patients in most need of foot checks. In the background, Abtrace automatically identified patients who were most overdue, and sent them an SMS or email, including a booking link for the most appropriate appointment. This means Abtrace did most of the work for them… without staff even realising!
‍
This involved:

Weekly automations to recall those most overdue a foot check.
Focusing staff efforts on targeted recall of those who did not respond to automated recall messages.

By adopting this proactive and automated method of foot check recall:

Our client achieved amazing results whilst simultaneously reducing the amount of staff effort spent on recall… Abtrace was doing most of the work for them!
They achieved a 63% reduction in the number of patients with overdue foot checks within 8 weeks of automation.
One third of overdue patients who were overdue a foot check had attended within the first 4 weeks of automation.
Our client redirected their valuable effort to those who did not respond to the automated recall, meaning any manual effort required was targeted to the right patient group from the very beginning.
This meant that the size of the patient list that staff needed to focus on was only 37% of the size of the original list!

Using Abtrace’s automated recall feature meant that the practice achieved optimal recall rates, increased QOF points and greater capacity for staff to focus their efforts where they were most needed; targeting those hard-to-reach patients, and providing increased capacity for clinical care.

However, that’s not where the journey ends. The practice will continue to reap the rewards of automated recall as our tool will continually monitor and recall patients who are overdue, or will become overdue soon, removing the burden of tracking this manually. Abtrace will also tell how the practice is performing against other common guidelines and rules through a simple traffic-light system, where:

Green means a patient is up to date - in this case, having had their annual foot check.
Orange means a patient isn't yet overdue, but they soon will be - we call this opportunistic testing.
Red means a patient is now overdue their test - for example, if they need an annual foot check but their latest one was over a year ago.

With Abtrace, this practice is already well on their way to keeping their diabetes patients up to date this year, without the need for an end of QOF year rush.

Focusing your efforts with Abtrace

The Problem

The "Traditional" Approach

The Abtrace Approach

Start onboarding your practice today.