The publication provides information about the number of practices offering their patients the ability to make clinical and administrative requests digitally via Online Consultation Systems and the number of such submissions received.
The publication includes figures for all practices that have agreed to participate in the collection and whose Online Consultation System supplier is currently contributing to the collection. The data for this publication is provided directly by the system suppliers on behalf of the practices that they serve. Some system suppliers are not yet able to provide data, although we anticipate that they will provide historical data once they are able to do so, which will enable us to revise the time series. We currently hold data for around three quarters of practices.
The publication consists of a national-level time series from April 2023 onwards, showing for each month:
- Counts of (a) all practices, (b) practices known to have an Online Consultation System and (c) practices that received one or more patient submissions via their Online Consultation System
- Registered patients for the three groups of practices listed
- Total submissions received via Online Consultation Systems, and classified as clinical, administrative or other/unknown type
- Rate of submissions per 1000 patients registered with practices known to have an Online Consultation System
There is also a practice-level table for the most recent month listing:
- All practices that were open at the beginning of the month
- The name of their Online Consultation Systems supplier(s) or “None/Unknown” for practices not currently covered by the collection
- The count of patient submissions received via Online Consultation Systems classified as clinical, administrative or other/unknown type
- Each practice’s registered patient count
- The rate of patient submissions received per 1000 registered patients
The accompanying CSV and the machine-readable open data file will include all months from the beginning of the financial year.
System suppliers are able to supply retrospective data and updates, which means this publication is a snapshot at the time of publication, and the time series and monthly practice-level figures may be subject to change in future releases.
It is important to note that no patient identifiable or patient-clinical information is collected or available in this release.
