Release date: 26th October
There is NO new Client Update required for this release
Translation
Engage Health Systems is committed to making its products as accessible as possible. Feedback suggests that often patients whose first language is not English struggle to access their GP practice and when they do they often input their enquiry in their native language, which then has to be manually translated which is both expensive and can reduce the time to triage. To assist with this process we have introduced automated translation in the Engage Client.
Should you choose to use this feature you can enable this through the Management Console.
Using Google Translate, the system will detect and translate any responses not in English. However, you will be warned that this has happened and a toggle switch will allow you to view the original text. When the request is sent to the patient's clinical record, it will always be sent in English.
Our translation feature has been in Beta for a couple of months now and overall the feedback has been very positive. When we asked one of our users if they were concerned around the Clinical Safety aspect of EC Translation, they told us that no translation is unsafe and this is so much better.
Read more from our Chief Operating Officer - Claire Flynn here.
Engage App
Engage Health Systems like many other suppliers on the DFOCVC framework are in a very difficult situation whereby we are unable to tender for Online Consultation opportunities because we are currently unable to offer Push functionality. This has already created a significant market imbalance and has inevitably led to a single supplier dominating the market. So what do we do? wait until the App team resources are available and in the interim decline future bids, or do we take a more pragmatic and practical approach.
So, Engage Health has taken the decision to develop its own app as an offering to help the NHS reduce its heady SMS burden, which we will be committed to make available to patients at zero cost and to Primary Care within our existing pricing structure. This will allow us to immediately offer a cost saving to the NHS through Push notification, but also to unlock other capability without the dependency upon App team resources. Patient feedback also indicates that a certain number of patients are unwilling to sign up to NHS Login due to the verification requirements, but they will sign up to an Engage Consult account.
We are in no way proposing that the Engage App is a replacement for NHS App, but rather a stepping stone to the NHS App for those individuals who do not want to use NHS Login but we will allow patients the choice to sign in using NHS Login or their Engage Consult account, with the aim to drive NHS App usage. We are fully aligned to supporting the NHS App achieve the aims of the Delivery plan for recovering access to Primary Care and believe that the NHS App should be the single point of access and we will certainly continue to steer all traffic to Login or App so that they can do more and benefit from its rich capabilities.
The new Engage App has been launched and can be downloaded by patients enabling them to receive Push notifications when the practice messages them. Users will also have the ability to submit requests via the App to their practice.
The Engage App can be downloaded on the Apple App Store, Android or Google Play.
Build your own questionnaires update
Build your own questionnaires has been a tremendous success with our existing users. In this next release you will now be able to add the specific clinical code (SNOMED and Read) onto your questionnaires.
Patient facing updates
When a user is logged into Engage Consult, they can submit a request (medical, admin or health data) on behalf of someone else. When they have selected the patient for whom they want to request help, we have added a banner to ensure they are reminded that they are answering the following questions on behalf of someone else.
