At the start of the migration, staff at Friary Medical Practice attended sessions with NECS to explore and document business processes.
Practice process optimisation involves a series of meetings to understand the processes that are in place now and to see how they translate once the surgery moves over to the new clinical system; in this case SystmOne. By undertaking these discussions and the subsequent writing up of documentation, it provides us with the foresight to prepare for the migration. There are five, two-hour sessions in all: management, clinical, administration, reception and dispensing.
Friary Medical Practice
The Practice Process Optimisation was so useful as full explanations were given for everything entailed in the migration. The team explained how the system would look and feel like in advance, e.g. creating the templates in advance of the go live. The training provided was really good and explained fully and very beneficial to all the practice staff.
The challenge
Having thought about practice process optimisation, the first questions asked were: What led you to this point and why are you migrating? The practice was due to merge and moving to SystmOne was a condition of that merger. It helped the team to see the migration from the practice’s perspective and a baseline from where we were starting this journey.
Practice process optimisation sets the precedence for what is to come, it underpins the concept that we are all aiming for: the best outcomes for staff and patients. Understanding what the team do now, shaping what this will look like in SystmOne lays the foundations for a go live where staff and trainers all know what the end goal needs to be.
Our collaboration
Having discussed the benefits of practice process optimisation with a colleague whose service does not offer these sessions, we invited them to join to get a feel for what we do. This collaboration proved to be invaluable and benefits were clear to see with our colleague stating: “It made lots of sense, really useful questions to get to know how they do things so the training and configuration are customised to the practice.”
From day one we developed a strong working relationship built on trust and two-way communication. “It was the most reassuring start to the project, gave us then confidence that you had it all in hand and understood how we want to work.
When asked what they thought practice process optimisation would be like, staff confirmed they didn’t know what to expect but got to know the processes, document an abundance of information that will feed into the migration, as well as the crucial unseen benefits.
The demonstrations completed as part of the practice process optimisation were also commented upon: “The demos gave us piece of mind, we could see and understand how our processes would work in SystmOne. It made us feel more familiar with SystmOne before we have even started using it.”
At the end of the practice process optimisation, we will start the next steps of the migration process. However, the firm foundations are already built, we have a great rapport, we have trust, we each know the other is committed and we are ready for what is to come. We achieved over and above what we set out to do with the information gathering of the practice process optimisation sessions.
Friary Medical Practice
Brilliantly organised and we got to ask lots of questions and to think about and discuss our processes which is a useful review for us as well as you (NECS).
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