Six months ago, we welcomed a busy multi-site GP practice in Hampshire to the Anima family. The practice was facing challenges most of our teams know all too well – the dreaded “8am rush.” Long wait times, a flood of phone calls, and patients competing to get through were causing chaos for both staff and patients.

To tackle this, the practice made a number of changes across their whole access model, including making improvements to their telephone and in-person access. A key change was introducing Anima as the online route of access for patients. Now, after half a year, we checked in to see how they were getting on.

Introducing online access

Before using Anima, the practice struggled to manage patient requests between 8 and 10 am, with phones ringing off the hook and a huge volume of appointment requests. Fast forward six months since introducing online access, and here’s what changed:

• Patients submitted over 6,600 admin and 5,300 medical requests through Anima.
  
  

• They’ve seen a 75% drop in calls and in-person requests during that busy 8-10 am window.
  
  

• Overall, the total number of calls has dropped by 55%, which means a lot less stress for both patients and staff.

These results came from simply giving patients more options to connect online, improving the telephony experience for patients, and providing smarter signposting to help them find the right services faster.

Thinking about routine access

The practice also tweaked how they handled routine vs. urgent care requests. By giving routine requests their own time slot, they saw some pretty big improvements in just a few months:

• Routine requests through Anima went up by 55%, meaning more patients are taking advantage of online access.
  
  

• Total call volume dropped by 37%

  • Particularly troublesome calls saw particular improvements - with incomplete calls down by 70%, and calls unable to connect by 82% during the 8-10am rush.
    
    

• Complaints and concerns fell by 34%.

That’s a lot of positive change in just a short time, all thanks to making online services easier to use.

Making total triage a success

The team at this practice knows they’re on the right track but also understand there’s more work to do. Patient satisfaction, as shown through NHS Family and Friends Test data, has been solid, and they’re focused on making things even better.

This is just the beginning of their journey with Anima, but the results so far are pretty clear – things are moving in the right direction.

Wondering where to start?

If the challenges here sound familiar to you, you'd like to turn around your access story in less than a year, we're here to help! The team can talk you through how Anima can help your team across our whole platform, from online access to transcription. Plus, having onboarded hundreds of practices, we can share best practices and key tips for making total triage a success.