More than eight in 10 GP practices ‘have digital telephony in place’

More than eight in 10 GP practices now ‘have digital telephony in place’, NHS England has said.

This year’s GP contract imposition stipulated that GP practices must procure cloud-based telephony once their current contracts expire.

The primary care recovery plan, published in May, announced £240m of funding for practices to ‘embrace latest technology’, with a focus on replacing old analogue phone systems.

Now NHS England said that there was a ‘huge upturn’ in the number of contracts issued and signed ‘over the last few weeks’, with 86% of practices now ‘having digital telephony in place’.

During a webinar last week, the commissioner said that 154 practices have transitioned from analogue to digital solutions, with further 851 having signed contracts and planned to go live by 31 March.

NHSE’s deputy director for digital primary care Rhodri Joyce told the webinar: ‘Our focus to date has been addressing our phase one cohort, essentially getting those who are still using analogue digital telephony across onto a digital platform. That cohort has been a practice cohort of about 1,000 that we’ve been working through.

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‘The target was to get 65%. We think we’re just in excess of 86% now and moving upwards. There is now only 26 that we are working through to be able to make sure we can support them through that.’

NHS England also said it put in place support for a ‘sub-optimal digital telephony uplift’ with supplier selection and contract drafting happening this month, contracts singed by February and live by March.

Mr Joyce said: ‘We are working through this with ICBs and at the moment, we have given them the allocation, and they are due to come back to us to nominate which practices are going to be part of that next phase, looking at where there is either suboptimal digital telephony providers or optimal digital telephony providers.’

During the same webinar, NHS England also said that a new NHS App functionality, going live 30 January, will allow patients to generate a prescription barcode to collect their medicines from any pharmacy.

Earlier this year, then health secretary Steve Barclay said that every GP practice in England had been working towards adopting digital telephony.

However, NHS England’s primary care director Dr Amanda Doyle told Pulse that having a new telephone system ‘is not the answer on its own’, and that it must be combined with other digital tools to improve patient experience.