North Camden PCN's Digital Champion and DJP journey

Daniel Gollop is the Digital Champion for North Camden PCN in London, a PCN comprising 5 practices with 50,000 patients combined. During his time on the Digital Champion programme, he was able to significantly improve his knowledge and skills regarding the digital services the practices provided, as well as becoming more proactive in finding ways to improve current services. He then made use of the DJP to roadmap improvements across his PCN.

‘A great example (of what I gained from the programme) has been learning more about how software suppliers have improved their support. I am able to help patients and colleagues if they have a query or encounter an issue with these’, said Daniel.

In addition, Daniel was able to develop a consistent approach across his PCN and foster good working relationships between the practices, given that they are now working much more closely together. Since the start of the programme, practices within North Camden PCN have moved to the same telephone service provider, upgraded their websites, and are even moving towards a PCN based website which patients from all practices from the PCN will be able to visit. They are also developing a PCN based social media page to provide updates to patients and provide information regarding health campaigns, to reduce duplication of this work across the practices.

‘Previously the phone lines were hard to manage as these were phone line based and required the use of extension numbers. As a PCN we moved to surgery connect – this allowed us to move our phone system to the cloud, which enabled greater autonomy over how the lines are managed.’ Daniel shared. ‘We are now able to set automatic messages which can be set by date, allow pathways to different teams to be managed, as well as having greater control over our voicemail functions, and allowing us to archive calls for improved auditing when phone recordings are required. All of which was outlined in the Digital Champion programme in terms of managing demand and appointments.’

The PCN also moved to one single provider for their websites. This improved the user interface and allowed for greater accessibility integration. It also allowed for the gathering of useful analytics to see how patients behaved and navigated on the website – all of which are features that are suggested in the DJP. Finally, the decision to move to a PCN-based website was to reduce the duplication in work as all practices were putting out similar information to patients.

When asked how other PCNs might replicate this great work, Daniel said: ‘A vital tool in this was the Digital Journey Planner, which allowed me to gauge the current position of the practices in terms of digital maturity, and create an action plan tailored to the needs of each practice while maintaining a consistent standard across the PCN. It gave us the tools to take a more introspective approach and decide which aspects of the plan we thought were most appropriate for the practices and our patients’.

The impact of this work has been that North Camden PCN have been able to:

• Improve phone line systems to give staff greater control and increase efficiency for the benefit of patients;
• Improve their websites and online services allowing for greater accessibility integration;
• Standardise health information across their PCN and reduce duplication and therefore workload across staff;
• Improve working relationships between practices and reduce variation across the PCN.