The problem
CQC rules stipulate that any patient on an SGLT2 inhibitor requires annual drug safety advice regarding the risk of Fournier's Gangrene and Diabetic Ketoacidosis. One of our practices found that despite their clinicians explaining this verbally, it was not coded correctly, and therefore they had no way of proving it when it came to CQC inspection.
The "traditional" approach
The Practice Manager was tasked with finding these patients, messaging them, and coding their notes with the appropriate SNOMED codes to prove that advice had been given. This was going to mean:
- A slow EHR search.
- Downloading a report.
- Uploading to a messaging platform.
- Batch coding the patient notes.
- All to be repeated later to catch any new patients, and then again next year to start all over again.
The Abtrace approach
One of the Abtrace team worked with the Practice Manager to quickly set this up as an automation. This took 5 minutes to complete and 4 simple steps:
- Search for SGLT2 inhibitors in the Abtrace Population View indications.
- Search for Education about Fournier's Gangrene and Education about DKA in the tasks.
- Select those who are opportunistic or overdue.
- Save as an automated recall.
We set this to run in the background, which meant the next day all 90 patients who needed this education were selected, and 84 were successfully messaged and therefore received the correct information. Importantly for CQC evidence, their notes were coded appropriately. The practice were easily able to identify the 6 patients who did not have mobile numbers, and contact them separately.
The automated search will continue to run each week, meaning any patients newly started on SGLT2 inhibitors will also receive the message. Importantly, the 84 patients who were successfully messaged will now be excluded from the results, so will not receive another message until they are again due for their annual advice next year.
This is a great example of how Abtrace can be used not only for recalling patients to ensure safe management of their long term conditions, but also as a mechanism to educate patients regarding important side effects.
The practice can now cross this job off their list, with the knowledge that Abtrace will be doing the work for them. All they must do is check their automation reports in case any patients were not contactable, and leave the automation to do the rest.
This practice is already feeling more secure in the knowledge that they are building strong evidence for their next CQC inspection, and are in the process of setting up more automations to improve their processes. Abtrace's proactive approach to monitoring, communicating with, and recalling patients means that your patient lists and monitoring will always be up to date, allowing you to achieve more with less, and freeing up valuable time to focus on what matters most: looking after your patients. It really is that easy.