The 1.94 New Features Webinar will take place on 4th July 2024 from 12.30pm - 13.15pm. You can register here.
Alternatively, the replay will be made available on this page shortly after.
New Features
Additional Clinical Questionnaires
We have added two new clinical questionnaires to the existing bank of questionnaires available on Patchs:
- Vaginal discharge
- Back pain (history + red flags). This is in addition to the existing 'Back pain red flags' questionnaire: it adds more useful details for history-taking.
Patient Gender Details
Patients are no longer asked to specify their gender when entering their personal details. Instead, they are asked to confirm which sex they were assigned at birth, with response options now being:
- Female
- Male
- Other
Additionally, a Help Page article explains that this question must be asked to match the patient to their medical record, and that it is not the same as their gender identity.
We are working on potentially removing this question entirely in future.
Patient Consents Page
To give greater clarity and reassurance to users, the Consents page has been simplified. Clicking ‘Accept and continue’ will now:
- indicate agreement to the T&Cs of the Patchs End User License Agreement (EULA)
- confirm that the user is over 16 years of age. This replaces the previous need for the user to check tick boxes before continuing.
Additionally, patients without a Patchs account will no longer be asked to re-give consent every time they receive a message from their practice. They will simply need to enter their date of birth.
Red Flag Question
The red flag question is shown to patients before submitting requests. It has now been expanded to include all symptoms specified by NHS guidelines:
New Features: Early Adopters
Save Patient Request Placeholder to Clinical System
Placeholder notes will now be automatically saved to patients’ records as soon as they submit a request.
This means that even if the request has not yet been seen/completed by a staff member, a clinician looking at a patient’s clinical record will be able to see that a request has been submitted.
Patchs admin users can enable this feature from the Feature Settings page:
Once the feature is enabled, you will see a green tick on the patient request page, confirming that a placeholder has been saved. For example:
In SystmOne, the placeholder will look like this:
In EMIS, the placeholder will look like this:
Automatically book Patchs consults into Clinical System Appointment Diary
When this feature is enabled, assigning a patient request to a staff member will now automatically create an appointment in the clinical system. This means that all Patchs activity will be counted in your GPAD reporting.
Patchs admin users can enable this feature from the Feature Settings page. From the same page, you are also able to manage your default diary preferences:
Once the feature is enabled, you will see the 'Save to appointment diary' option on the patient requests page:
When the appointment has been saved, you will see this green tick confirmation:
Patient Communication Consent Status
This feature allows you to easily see whether a patient has consented to be contacted by SMS and/or by email.
When you are sending a message to an individual patient, you will now see new icons on the right-hand side of the page:
- a green tick indicates consent has been given
- a red cross indicates consent has been declined
A full description of the available consent statuses can be found here.
Bug Fixes
Occasional page freezing
Previously, when a staff user was selecting a slot/clinic type in order to send a patient a self-book appointment message, the page was occasionally freezing. This has now been fixed.