For sensitive clinical information, you should use a secure email system (NHS Mail, Egress) or encrypted links. For non-clinical communication (e.g., service queries, appointment management), for scaled or growing practices we recommend a support desk solution such as Freshdesk. Freshdesk enables you to manage high volumes of customer queries in an efficient and effective manner.
Ticketing systems, in one form or another, are used by almost all mid and large size businesses. They are designed to enable team collaboration, and enhance productivity. Through a ticketing system an email is received, it is assigned a ‘ticket number’, and based on rules it can be auto assigned to specific groups (e.g., Secretaries) or individuals.
Management is able to track response times, and automate responses to common queries through ‘canned’ or ‘prewritten’ responses. Solutions like Freshdesk are designed to enable collaborative responding with inline comments and draft features making it simple to construct replies together.
Freshdesk is a solution that we’ve helped implement at a number of private GP services. We favour this over other solutions (e.g., Front, Zendesk, Missive, Scout) for a few reasons:
Freshdesk is also highly interoperable; you can feed Whatsapp messages and SMS into the inbox, and via integration engines like Zapier you can easily extract information into other tools.
Depending on the price point of your practice, and the volumes of patients you are looking after, you may find it advantageous to use a tool like Freshdesk to fully digitalise your patient communication.
Whilst phone has the benefit of personalisation, delivering a safe and consistent experience 9-6 Mon-Fri can be challenging, especially given the high expectations of customers used to a free NHS service.
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