Helping practices engage at scale
Published by Liam Fisher on
Jul 16, 2021 1:58:31 PM
Meet the Flagships – Arrow Surgery, Henley in Arden Medical Centre, Pool Medical Centre and Tanworth-in-Arden Medical Practice. These four practices joined the Mjog Flagship Programme collaboration team in April this year. We caught up with Business Manager Benjamin Haresign.
Can you tell us about your role as business manager, and what it’s like to work across four practices?
Whilst our focus, of course, is on providing the best possible care to our patients, we ensure we manage our practices as businesses. Part of my role is to make sure we are hitting our QOF and enhanced service targets which keeps our business model viable, and I do that in part by managing the implementation and streamlining of processes. This can be tricky to oversee across four practices because they all work in different ways.
Our patient demographics differ too. We are classed as rural practices with patient numbers ranging from 4,500 to 8,000 – but we cover a large area geographically. Some practices have a higher percentage of older patients who prefer face-to-face appointments, other practices have seen more demand for telephone consultations. So, one of my goals is to get all of our practices on board with implementing new technology that will streamline processes. We’ve been using MJog since the start of 2021 to do just that.
Can you tell us more about how you’ve been using MJog?
We’ve been using MJog for Batch Messaging via SMS. The feedback I’ve received from our admin teams is that the batch messaging is significantly simplifying their role, because they no longer have to spend a whole day sending notices to patients, individually. Before MJog, our teams would be given a list of, say, 150 patients each to contact about their diabetes check-up, or their flu vaccination. With batch texting, the onus is on the patient to get in touch with us. Our time is then freed up to make contact with the patients who haven’t engaged with the message, and offer them the best care possible, too.
We’ve moved to MJog’s smart messaging recently. Two of our practices were already using MJog for basic patient messaging, so I trained the team at the remaining two and introduced them all to the use of smart templates which they can replicate when they need to. It’s getting good feedback and has really built trust from our patient community in the source of the text itself, in this world of fear around spam messages.
What other benefits are you seeing from MJog’s batch messaging service?
MJog has really helped to streamline previous flu vaccination campaigns and has helped us to continue to meet our QOF targets. We have it working in-line with our phone system so that once we’ve sent a batch flu jab message, we can see who is calling us regarding that text. This allows us to add appropriate resource into the group, so our team isn’t overstretched and there aren’t long waiting times for patients at the other end of the phone. We have also made the appointments bookable online, and I’m using my own trackable short links in the batch messaged texts to monitor the effectiveness of the messages and their impact on web traffic and bookings.
If the COVID vaccination booster campaign goes practice level, we’ll certainly look to use MJog’s batch messaging for this as well.
What does being part of the Flagship Programme mean to you?
Being part of the Flagship Programme is enabling us to become more innovative in ways of working by trailing new ideas from MJog, and it gives us the ability to feedback suggestions and ideas on how this would work best at practice level. Being able to share ideas with the Flagship team and being part of the development process has also allowed us to rethink our own processes in practice to adapt to becoming futureproof.
Having a direct contact with the team also provides valuable support should we need it as MJog is always at the end of the phone for advice and guidance.
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Flagship Programme