At Redmoor Health, we’ve been helping practice teams, the wider NHS and communities to support patients to ‘get online’ to access health services for several years now. We have also been out and about this year at various events asking the question, ‘Does your digital front door revolve?’.
We ask this question in relation to the experience of patients who report their online user journey as ‘going around in circles’. Similarly, as providers in healthcare, the NHS has access to a myriad of digital products, not always well designed or interconnected, that occasionally send people shooting off in directions they weren’t expecting or losing them on the way to finding help. Primary care staff often ask us for help to understand all the features across different software and systems and how to get the best out of them together.
So, I’m delighted to see the announcement that the NHS App is being redesigned, following extensive user research to improve that journey and to become the essential part of the digital front door, along with good websites, making entry into NHS care easier.
From 12th Dec, NHS App users will be prompted to update their App and will start to see some changes, making things simpler to navigate, with clearer language and a more intuitive experience – wonderful stuff!
The NHS set a target of 75% of the adult population in England to be registered to use the NHS App and NHS website by March 2024. That’s a big ambition, especially with over 10m of the population still lacking the most basic digital skills, according to Good Things Foundation Digital Nation UK 2023. It’s also not so easy to ask patients to move from another App that they have used successfully for several years, to something new when they can’t see any additional benefit.
We thought we would offer you some help along the way to achieve this target. You might consider this a late Black Friday, a Cyber Monday or even an early January Sale deal from the team at Redmoor Health.
In Jan, we will host a couple of free webinars not only to walk you through the changes, describing the additional benefits, not just for patients but for practice staff too, in terms of time saved and an easier workflow.
For anyone still wondering what to do for their QOF (quality outcomes framework) quality improvement project in practice or PCN (primary care network), we have a simple action plan to help you to increase the numbers of patients who order their medication online.
We can help you to to find your data as a baseline, so you can show the improvement and help to secure your 30% funding against the capacity access and improvement plans.
Polite plea to the NHS App data people – how about providing the data out in the open, instead of behind this dashboard and let us help you to share it widely through our digital maturity index. If you are curious, have a quick look at this explanatory DMI video, where we have just added NHS App as a separate dataset, helping practices to see all of their available ‘online data’ in one place.
In addition to the content provided in templated scripts for websites, socials, messages and telephone, we can also help to maximise awareness and engagement with a full suite of social media posts ready to release over the coming months. If you don’t have the time to post, or don’t feel confident in using social media, we can offer you support to do this via our social media managed service. Over 650 practices have chosen this option and if you’d like to see some reviews before you decide, head over to Practice Index.
Don’t worry if you miss the NHS App webinar on 19th Dec, (we know you are very busy in the run up to the holiday period) you can attend one of our two webinars in Jan 2024. Simply book your place here for 11th Jan 2024, 12 o’clock, or 30th Jan 2024, 12 o’clock.
If you book to join us, we’ll give you the discount code for the social media managed service so you can have 12 months for the price of 9 months at £349 for the year. That’s the equivalent of ½ day locum fee, or 1 week of admin time for a full year service. What’s not to like!
Looking forward to seeing the effects of this as a campaign to support General Practice. If you’d like to join us, get in touch hello@redmoorhealth.co.uk
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