In April 2023 we launched our free Accumail feature nationally to primary care users, enabling them 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 eRS isn’t supported, or for advice and guidance.
At Accurx, our vision is for a health system where everyone involved in a patient’s care can communicate to deliver better care. Yet currently, GPs experience system-hopping and duplication of cross-network conversations when trying to communicate with other care settings. This is time-consuming and often doesn’t give assurance that messages have been received, or provide clear audit trails with visibility of ongoing conversations.
That’s why we developed Accumail - to join up care communication for Integrated Care Systems and Primary Care Networks, and support more efficient and seamless patient flow across care settings. In this blog, we take a look at the core benefits of Accumail, and why GP practices are loving it.
- Easily find the right contact across NHS services
Accumail 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 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
Accumail takes the system-hopping and duplication out of conversations between healthcare professionals, letting users save messages securely to the record with one click and attach documents directly from the patient’s record.
A GP Partner in Wessex, says: “I was speaking to someone at another practice recently, they were saying ‘you know, all of these referral documents we’ve got to send - it’ll take days to get our admin sorted out’. I said, ‘I just press one button and it just goes!’.”
- 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.
Sarah, Administrator, South Yorkshire ICB, said: “Accurx has been a game changer… nearly everything can be done electronically from here. I rarely use NHS mail now for referrals. It’s amazing, I love it.”
Accumail is a natural extension to current workflows that are second nature to the 98% of GP practices already using Accurx. It requires little to no time on training or implementation for practice staff to start seeing benefits and support NHS improvement targets for patient experience, ease of access and demand management within General Practice.
A final word from our Head of Clinical, Dr Satya Raghuvanshi…
“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.”
To get started with Accumail, simply click the @ symbol in your Accurx toolbar and send yourself a test message to see how it works. We'd also recommend taking a look at our interactive demo for a run through of how it works.