At the heart of virtually every community in the UK, General Practitioners (GPs) have a crucial role in providing healthcare services to local people and families. Local surgeries are often busy places and GPs make daily decisions about how to best treat patients, either in the first instance or over the longer term.

Through the course of a day, most GPs and their colleagues meet a variety of very different patients with various health conditions. Many patient visits to the GP will involve routine and simple tests, such as blood pressure taking, which may be carried out by the GP or the practice nurse.

Where patients with long term or chronic diseases are visiting the GPs surgery for single tests, telehealth solutions are a viable, reliable and time-saving alternative. Unless they have a specific need to do so, not all patients need to travel to and from the surgery. Furthermore this approach to healthcare also means that GPs can avoid unnecessary hospital admissions.

By remotely monitoring patients in their homes or in other places such as residential care homes, GP’s can effectively monitor the progress of their patients with exactly the same tests and results. Furthermore this frees up the GP to concentrate their face to face consultations on patients who really do need to be seen in the surgery.

For GPs who perform routine medical tests in local care and residential homes, telehealth is an effective alternative and may be undertaken by care home staff. In such circumstances, Docobo provides a multi-user HealthHUB which more than one patient may use for monitoring.

There are also several benefits for the practice as a whole.

For example, telehealth assists GPs with QOF, the Quality & Outcomes Framework which remunerates general practices for providing good quality care to their patients, and to help fund work to further improve the quality of health care delivered.

And for GPs running private practices, doc@HOME is increasingly becoming an ‘added value’ solution for patients who recognise the benefits of basing their healthcare on close, attentive and professional healthcare screening.