Don't Drown in Demand: The Hidden Risks of the New GP Contract and Increased Online Consultation Access

October is coming, fast. With it, the new GP contract requirements mandates that your online consultation system must stay open throughout the day for routine requests. Whilst this sounds simple, it creates a significant challenge for patient safety and practice workload. 

What happens if you’re inundated with urgent requests or an urgent request is submitted just before your practice closes, buried under a mountain of routine queries? It’s a key concern for practice managers and GPs alike, and one that demands a robust solution. 

Common Approaches and Their Limitations 

Online consultation providers are promoting two approaches: 

1. The Warning Message: Simply telling patients not to submit urgent requests after a certain time can be ineffective. Patients aren't clinicians; they often don't know what is truly "urgent," and these warnings are easily missed or ignored, leaving the practice carrying the risk.
2. The Manual "Total Triage" Model: Practices are being encouraged to adopt a manual "Total Triage" model where clinical staff must manually review an uncapped number of patient requests as they arrive. This can be a disruptive and expensive change as it places a huge administrative burden on your team, increases costs and workload, and still doesn't stop urgent requests from landing in your inbox at the end of a busy day. 

Unfortunately, neither of these approaches are likely to be effective, on their own Practices need a reliable, technical solution to manage these challenges effectively, without adding to staff burnout. 

What should GPs be looking out for when looking for an all-day online consultation solution?  

Practices need a solution that can automatically care navigate patients based on their own care pathways with the ability to determine the clinical urgency of requests. By doing so, the practice can continue to operate in an effective way without driving up costs or jeopardising patient safety. 

What’s needed is a process that: 

• Meets the new contract requirements 
• Minimises the resourcing burden 
• Supports clinical safety by ensuring urgent requests are recognised reliably 
• Provides richer, more useful information from patients at the outset 

A Smarter, Safer Way Forward with Patchs AI 

Patchs is the only product that meets these needs. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Care Navigator, a registered medical device, is able to detect nearly 200 health conditions and can support patients using your own care pathways. By identifying emergency and urgent issues whilst patients are submitting their requests, they can be directed away from online services when you’ve reached capacity. Ensuring you can continue to deliver an efficient and safe service. 

Furthermore, the AI Care Navigator can automatically book patients into appointments, provide tailored self-help advice, ask tailored clinical questionnaires to collect more information upfront, and much more. This is all designed to help you manage your demand and save you time. 

How accurate is it? Scientific studies by the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge have shown our AI has the same accuracy as an experienced GP when identifying urgent requests. 

The Only Technical Solution to the October Challenge 

How will it stop urgent requests being submitted by patients after we have reached clinical capacity? It’s simple: 

1. You set a rule in Patchs to stop accepting urgent online requests after a specific time, 2 PM for example. 
2. When a patient submits a request, our AI analyses what they have written – collecting additional clinical information if required – and then determines the urgency 
3. If the request is urgent and after the specified time, it's prevented from being submitted and the patient is shown a custom message you've created (or chosen from one of our templates), directing them to a safer care pathway, such as calling the practice instead. 

Routine and admin requests get through as normal, but urgent requests will now be managed by this automated safety-net, freeing up your team's time and reducing pressure.   

You meet your contractual obligations, your team is protected from overload and late-day urgent queries, and your patients are kept safe. 

With Patchs, you can manage the new requirements without relying on ineffective warning messages or a costly, disruptive move to manual "Total Triage". It's an intelligent, active safety net for your practice. 

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To see how Patchs can protect your practice and patients this October, book a demo with our team today.