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As part of its commitment to continue to deliver high quality general practice in the climate of reducing budgets, South Cheshire and Vale Royal GP Alliance is at the forefront of IT innovation. In working with Lexacom, the alliance has found a partner that is willing to adapt and develop its services to support the federation as it grows and changes.

“The future of general practice is working at scale in an efficient, lean, cost effective way that standardises and harmonises the delivery of care across a patch. By moving our GP federation’s member practices onto the Lexacom Cloud we are delivering these goals. Lexacom truly understands general practice and is the innovative and agile partner we need in these challenging times.”

Dr Neil Paul – GP, GP Federation Board Member and Community Services Director

The South Cheshire and Vale Royal GP Alliance is an ambitious federation of 30 practices determined to harness the benefits of delivering primary care at scale. The alliance is developing innovative ways to enhance patient care and improve efficiency. Key to its plans is the ability to share information and resources across its practice network.

With some member practices already using digital dictation, the federation was keen to look at a system that would enable information sharing. As the only system which provides secure, cloud-based digital dictation and document creation software, Lexacom Connect was the obvious choice for the alliance. Lexacom Connect allows the federation’s practices to create shared secretarial pools to transcribe dictations, ensuring adequate admin resource is available during workload peaks and staff shortages.

Tara Moylan, Head of Projects, said: “Connecting all our practices is a win-win. It is easy to connect, share resources and sort out any issues.”

The federation is divided into six care communities, all of which are focusing on specific aspects of care to improve services for patients. One care community is already using Lexacom Connect to support its service delivery across its network. Some individual practices are also making use of Lexacom Echo, the advanced speech recognition software accessible via the same platform. As work progresses, the care communities are sharing best practice and supporting fellow care communities in implementing new ways of working.

Feedback from one practice secretary at Ashfields Primary Care suggests that Lexacom is easier and more flexible to use than their previous software. “With Lexacom, it’s very easy to see which dictations are urgent. We can also opt to sort dictations by size and author if we need to clear a backlog or complete one clinician’s dictations ahead of annual leave, for example.”

In addition to making full use of Lexacom 3 digital dictation, one practice is about to trial medical transcription service, Accuro. In addition, the alliance is trialling remote working for secretarial staff using Lexacom Connect, which will allow practices to offer more flexible working arrangements, with the appropriate governance in place.

“These latest developments are in their infancy and it’s exciting to see just how much flexibility we can offer practices and their teams by making best use of Lexacom’s secure cloud technology. When it comes to supporting our practices, there is no one size fits all solution. The combination of remote working, shared secretarial pools, speech recognition and outsourced transcription gives our 30 practices a variety of options to consider as we work together to improve efficiency and patient care.” Tara Moylan added.

By exploring the pooling of back office resources, the alliance aims to free up staff time which could be used to deliver the some of the ambitious changes set out in the Five Year Forward View.

“Whenever we suggest new ideas, Lexacom come back with suggestions for software developments which support our needs. The Lexacom team seems as excited about our plans as we are and it’s exciting to be working together on new innovations.” Tara concluded.