What is Care Navigation?
Care Navigation is designed to assist patients in navigating to the appropriate service within your practice or PCN.
With patient demand regularly exceeding a practice's capacity, it is vital to ensure that practice resources are allocated efficiently. Practice resources are broadly spread, encompassing not just GPs, but also nurses, HCAs and other healthcare professionals, at both the GP and PCN site - directing patients to the appropriate service is both harder and more important than ever before.
Care Navigation helps to direct patients to the appropriate service at the time of their query. This could be pointing them to external out-of-hours services or an Enhanced Access booking when the practice is closed, or during hours it could be capturing information on a new condition for review by a clinician. Hero's Care Navigation facilitates these types of scenarios.
How should I use Care Navigation?
Hero's Care Navigation is best used as the point of entry for any patient engaging with your practice. This includes:
Patients engaging with you online
Patients engaging with you in person
Patients engaging with you over the phone
For online enquiries, Hero's Care Navigation can be embedded into your website. You can customise your Care Navigation, so that:
You display different options during hours and out of hours
You alert patients to relevant online self-help and self-referral services
You accept online bookings for selected appointment types (e.g., flu)
For enquiries that can't be resolved by directing elsewhere, self-help, self-referral or a real-time booking - you can setup request forms for patients to provide information to you in a structured way. You can configure different forms for medical enquiries and administrative requests.
What is a pathway?
Patient enquiries can generally be grouped into different categories, for example:
Medical requests
Administrative requests
Requests appropriate for self-help
Within Hero, these kind of categories are known as 'Pathways'. You can create your own pathways (although we'll populate your Care Navigation with pathways for Administrative enquiries, Medical issues and Register at the practice).
Pathways form the point of entry for your Care Navigation. The first choice a patient makes when viewing your online Care Navigation page is to select a pathway:
What is a Care Navigation Option?
Every pathways ends in a Care Navigation 'option'. A Care Navigation option is tracked for the purpose of reporting, and can take different forms:
Request - A structured form that is then viewable within the Hero workflow. You can create your own request forms.
URL redirect - A link to an external URL, such as a page on your website or the NHS website
Appointment booking - This is a link to book a specific appointment
3rd party app - You can redirect patients to 3rd party apps, such as Joy for Social Prescribing or eConsult for Medical Device triage submissions
An example list of submissions is shown below:
