Access Optimisation Programme – Surgery Connect Academy

Optimise Patient Access

The carefully created courses are designed to help you deliver the best possible experience for staff and patients.

What is the Access Optimisation Programme?

In primary care, delivering a great patient experience is more critical than ever. To deliver modern general practice successfully surgeries not only need to have the right tools in place, but they need to know how to utilise those tools effectively.

The Access Optimisation Programme (AOP) supports practices to get the most out of digital telephony, through the many features of Surgery Connect. These interactive eLearning courses will help you do just that.

Learn more about AOP

Access Optimisation Courses

Advanced Clinical Integration

This course will provide a high level overview of the benefits that can be achieved from making full use of the advanced features of Clinical Integration within your Surgery Connect system.

Course Overview
Navigating Patient Access With Call Routing

This course will provide a high level overview of how to make best use of the Surgery Connect features that will streamline your patient care navigation, whilst saving your staff time.

Course Overview
Mastering The Phonebar (SystmOne)

Are you making the most of all the features of the Phonebar? This course will explain how you can maximise the features of the Phonebar to suit the needs and demands of your surgery. Helping you optimise patient communications and enhance operational efficiencies within the surgery.

Course Overview
Mastering The Phonebar (EMIS)

Are you making the most of all the features of the Phonebar? This course will explain how you can maximise the features to suit the needs and demands of your surgery. Helping you optimise patient communications and enhance operational efficiencies within the surgery.

Course Overview
Reports and Data Analysis

This course will walk you through everything you need to know about Reports and Data Analysis. It will help you to report on call traffic to maintain the highest level of service, improve answer times and manage call routing to minimise queue times and reduce missed calls.

Course Overview
Optimise Patient Callback

Everything you need to know about Patient Callback in bite-sized chunks. The Patient Callback feature offers your patients virtual queuing so they don’t need to stay on the phone, keeping their place in the queue.

Course Overview

AOP National Webinar Series

In June, as part of our Access Optimisation programme, we hosted a series of complimentary webinars focusing on the four key features at the centre of improved access.

Our experts dived into the benefits of each function and provided attendees with practical insights on leveraging these features to their fullest potential. Following each webinar we collated the main Q&As that came out of each session.

View Q&As

Inbound call	An inbound call is a call made into the surgery on one of your inbound telephone numbers
Outbound call	An outbound call is a call made from the surgery’s service (external calls only)
Queued call	A queued call are those that joined a Group queue and started the queueing process to speak to one of your staff
Missed call	Missed calls are calls that could have been answered by a staff member because it either targeted a user directly or joined a queue for a distribution group. A call does not have to make it to the front of a queue to count as missed, it purely has to join the queue
Abandoned call	Abandoned calls are calls that your staff had no chance of answering as they either did not target a user directly or did not enter a queue for a group of users. Situations where this could be the case are when the caller rings in whilst the practice is closed, or the caller does not respond to a menu and hangs up before making a choice
CLI	The CLI is the number displayed in the call ID to the recipient of that call This may be withheld or a telephone number. It also relates to the callers number when they ring into the Surgery Connect service.
Average call duration	This is an average length of a call - Active time on an answered call - this does not include any queue time
Total call duration	This is the actual length of a call including all of the call flow, queueing, talk or hold time that may have occurred
Maximum call concurrency	This is how many individual calls are happening at the same time

Queued for group	The total number of calls that queued for that group
Answered from queue	The number of calls in the queue that were answered
% answered from queue	The percentage of calls answered from the queue
Missed from queue	This is the total number of calls that joined the queue but did not get answered
% missed from queue	The percentage of calls missed from the queue
Missed from queue under 10 seconds	These are the calls that joined the queue but the caller hung up before 10 seconds of queueing had occurred. These may not want to be considered when assessing call answering efficiency as there was little chance of your staff answering these calls due to the caller hanging up so quickly
Queue duration	The length of time the caller spent in the queue

Calls when patient callback active	This is the total number of inbound calls whilst patient callback was offered
Calls handled by patient callback	This is the number of calls that chose the patient callback option
Callbacks made	This is the number of callback calls made
Callbacks accepted	This is the number of callback calls that were answered and accepted by the patients
Callbacks rejected	This is the number of callback calls that were unanswered or cancelled by the patients
Queue timeout	This is where a maximum queue time has been set on the service and the time in that queue is reached
Caller rang back in	This is where a caller has selected a callback but has rung in and rejoined the queue before they have received a callback from the surgery
Caller rang back in - rejoined queue	This where a caller has selected a callback but has rung in and rejoined the queue before they have received a callback from the surgery
Caller rang back in - hung up	This is where a caller has called in again and hung up
Caller rang back in - cancelled	This is where a caller has a callback booked but has rung in and cancelled that callback when given the option
Time in virtual queue	This is the amount of time the callers would have spent in the queue if they had not selected a callback

Report Column Name	Explanation
Hour/Day	The report can be by hour, or by day
Calls When Patient Callback Active	Patient Callback only becomes active when your parameters are met - this tells you how many calls you received overall when those parameters were met
Calls Handled by Patient Callback	Patient Callbacks requested (in that hour/day)
Callbacks Made	Patient Callbacks made (in that hour/day)
Callbacks Accepted	Successful callbacks (in that hour/day)
Callbacks Rejected	Callback rejected
Callback Attempts Exceeded	Calllback where the attempts were exceeded - not answered
Queue Timeout	Where any max queue duration settings are met
Callback Reset	Callback cancelled due to closure times
Caller Rang Back In	Caller rang back in before callback attempted
Caller Rang Back in - Rejoined Queue	Caller rang back in before callback attempted and re-joined the queue
Caller Rang Back in - Hung Up	Caller rang back in before callback attempted and hung up (stayed in callback queue)
Caller Rang Back in - Cancelled	Caller rang back in before callback attempted and cancelled the callback request
Total time in virtual queue	Total time all calls in that hour/day were in the virtual queue
Avg time in virtual queue	Average time each call in that hour/day was in the virtual queue
Total Time in real queue	If someone rings back in and rejoins the “real” queue this would be reflected here.
Avg time in real queue	If someone rings back in and rejoins the “real” queue this would be reflected here.

Optimise Patient Access

What is the Access Optimisation Programme?

Access Optimisation Courses

Advanced Clinical Integration

Navigating Patient Access With Call Routing

Mastering The Phonebar (SystmOne)

Mastering The Phonebar (EMIS)

Reports and Data Analysis

Optimise Patient Callback

AOP National Webinar Series

General Terms

Group/queue terms

Patient Callback terms