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WaitLess

Came across this interesting app WaitLess being used in Kent. It is free and shows members of the public where the shortest wait at local A&Es and walk-in centers to try and even out the queue. You could see in a federated GP future where GPs join together for same day urgent appointments and are

Ideas for your GP Federation to help their practices with

We encouraged one of the GP federations that we work with to invest in IT support and it has contracted through us four IT support staff that we supervise to help support the programmes listed below. They role involves horizon scanning for solutions to help practices, by testing innovative products, by project managing implementation of

Things a GP federation could be doing

Howbeck Healthcare was setup in 2014 to work with GP practices wanting to work at scale and has successfully now helped to setup five Federations. We now work with all of them and others, finding and employing staff for them, writing bids (successfully winning over £4m in new work), managing projects and providing strategic and operational

AF Screening

AF screening appears to have become a hot topic again. Some would cynically say this is being driven by the pharma companies selling NOACs who always like to promote a disease that they have a drug for.  However, Public Health England appear to agree it’s a priority and there is a lot of evidence that

How GPs are paid 3

My last piece talked about expenses. Since I posted it the NHS HSCIC has published an interesting document on GP income. Have a look at http://www.hscic.gov.uk/catalogue/PUB16847/nhspaymentsgp-13-14-anx.xlsx This downloads (a large) spreadsheet that details gross income by GP practice. The columns split this into income sources. Now I havent explained these yet – my next piece

How GPs are paid 2

In my last piece we looked at how a GP practice makes its money and we saw they are much like any other business and run on the the golden formula. Profit = Income – Expenses. The main difference is most GP practices are run as a partnership which is a particular UK company structure

How GPs are paid

In my monthly articles on e-health insider I talk about topics related to IT and primary care from my perspective as a jobbing GP doing 4 days a week of general practice. However there are quite a few topics I’d like to discuss that the remit of that column doesn’t allow me to cover and