A North West-based tech specialist is offering a digital solution to under-pressure GP surgeries.
Redmoor Health believes its ‘Digital Journey Planner’ can identify areas where GP practices can make better use of technology and shows them how to do it.
The Preston tech specialist has spent £50,000 and 12 months developing its coaching and support webtool, which is already attracting national interest.
Redmoor Health’s founder Marc Schmid said: “Some practices are doing well with digital and some are really struggling. The Digital Journey Planner takes GP practices down a journey by asking a series of questions that provides them with an implementation plan to improve.
“It’s an online self-assessment and the three key steps are: Baseline; learn; improve. It gives practices an opportunity to understand where they’re at digitally. For example, how are they doing with video, social media and their website? It signposts this with packages of support that are available.
“At the end of the day it gives them an improvement plan. The reason why this is important is there’s a huge amount of investment in tech within health but the support required to help staff to get the best out of it is often overlooked.
“This tool will eventually be rolled out to practices so they can start to see where the gaps are and where they need to invest more. They get it in a report so they can understand it.”
Redmoor is working with Lancashire-based Workhouse Marketing on developing the Digital Journey Planner but Schmid said it was already attracting a lot of interest.
“As well as receiving interest nationally from NHS England we’ve been contacted by four NHS regions who are interested in working with us,” he said.
“To date we have trialled it with practices across 13 Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) but this number is increasing on a weekly basis. We’ve made the decision not to land it with practices at the moment simply because they are overwhelmed with demand following the pandemic.”
Redmoor Health are recruiting two extra members of staff to help with the roll-out.
Schmid added: “It’s important to say we developed the Digital Journey Planner with the NHS to help GP practices on their digital journey and streamline the process.
“The Digital Journey Planner helps practices measure their digital maturity and provide them with a development programme which will be delivered by Redmoor’s team of experienced advisors.
“It’s not an auditing tool because we need people to be honest about it. If you’re really struggling with digital we want the Digital Journey Planner to help take you to the next level.”