The next step in our journey... Launching accuRx Plus
It continues to be a privilege to help you help your patients. The last six months have seen a transformation in the uptake of technology in healthcare. We appreciate you’ve had to drastically change how you deliver care and we at accuRx feel privileged to have played a part in helping you communicate effectively with your patients. Our mission, to bring patients and their healthcare teams together, has never felt more important.
Together we've shown how technology can be rapidly adopted in healthcare, but only if it's useful, intuitive and reliable. However, as uptake of our software has increased, with more messages being sent, our costs have gone up too.
To continue to support you and to allow us to keep innovating, we're launching accuRx Plus in January 2021. accuRx Plus is a set of premium features - some exciting new ones (like batch messaging), and some that we added to support the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
As promised, there will always be a free version of accuRx (called accuRx Lite) that will include all functionality that existed before March 2020.
accuRx Plus will include the following modules:
- Patient Triage (online consultations) - available to buy now
- Batch messaging and appointment reminders - launching in Jan 2021
- An expanded Florey questionnaire suite - launching in Jan 2021
- Video - chargeable from April 2021
- SMS Plus: Requesting a Patient Response, Attaching a Document and Pathways - chargeable from April 2021
Modules can be bought separately but are cheaper if bundled.
Please note: Both Requesting a Patient Response and Attaching a Document will be free until April 2021. From April, both these features and Pathways will each be restricted to 20 uses per practice per week.
Who can buy accuRx Plus?
The last thing we want to do is leave you in the lurch. We will be speaking to commissioners in every part of the UK in the coming months and we will do our utmost to make accuRx Plus available in as many areas as possible. accuRx Plus is cheapest when purchased at a larger scale, so we’ll be speaking to local commissioners first, but where commissioners can’t fund accuRx Plus, it will be possible for PCNs or Federations to buy instead.
Our approach to building healthcare technology
Since February 2018, we've been providing Chain SMS for free to practices across the country. We've sent over 30 million messages to over 16 million patients. If each message saves on average five minutes, that's over 2.5 million hours of staff time saved.
We think you deserve healthcare IT that...
- Is a pleasure to use
- Is built through collaboration with users and a strong understanding of their needs
- Just works, as intended
- Frees up time for the people that use it
- Provides effective, responsive and empathetic user support
- Is intuitive, and doesn't need any training
- Actively seeks your feedback and acts upon it
- Supports existing healthcare providers, rather than competing with them by offering rival services
- Is always improving, with stable releases at least weekly
- Goes above and beyond existing security requirements
- Ultimately, makes your patients healthier, your team happier, and your service more efficient
We hope you agree.
Responding to COVID-19
On Friday 6th March, we spoke to practices concerned about seeing patients with symptoms of COVID-19. We knew we had to act fast, and over the weekend built a simple way to both screen patients for COVID-19, and conduct a consultation over a video call. We've continued to improve these features, whilst allowing you to also receive replies and photos, monitor patients remotely, send documents to patients, and more.
Every day we've been inspired by how innovatively you've used accuRx in a difficult time. Your usage has increased, and we're privileged we've been able to help. But our costs have gone up too. We now need to move to a more sustainable model so that we can continue to support you, and keep building the future of healthcare communication.
Next steps
We are aware you’ll be under lots of pressure over winter, and that you’ll have embedded new processes around our features. For this reason, all features that are currently free will remain free until April 2021. Some next steps...
- If you would like to help us secure funding in your area, please complete this form.
- We are also holding a webinar on accuRx Plus on 1st October at 16:00 GMT where we will present accuRx Plus and answer your questions. You can register to attend here.
We're excited for this next step in our journey and couldn't be more grateful for your continued support. You've seen what we can do for free, just imagine what we'll be able to do once we're properly funded. Keep giving us feedback and keep holding us to a high bar - it's the only way we can keep improving.
We continue to be in awe of the compassion and dedication you show your patients, and feel honoured to be a small part of that. Thanks for continuing to support our mission - we will work harder than ever to help you achieve yours.
The accuRx team