This publication provides information about the number of clinical or administrative submissions that general practices receive from their patients via Online Consultation Systems. This information is published monthly and includes practice-level data about system availability and usage.
Data is included for the following measures:
• Practices: The total count of practices along with the number of practices known to have an Online Consultation System and the number of practices that received one or more patient requests/submissions via their Online Consultation System
• Count of registered patients
• The total submissions received via Online Consultation Systems, broken down into clinical, administrative or other/unknown submission type
• The rate of submissions per 1,000 patients registered with practices known to have an Online Consultation System
• Count of the number of submissions by weekday and submission time
This data reflects demand for general practice services, both clinical and administrative, that is received from patients via Online Consultation Systems. It is not a measure of all requests received by practices which may also be received in other ways, for example in person, by telephone call and does not reflect the totality of demand faced by general practice.
The suppliers of Online Consultation Systems provide the data for this publication on behalf of the practices that they serve, and which have agreed to participate in the collection. Some system suppliers are not yet able to provide data for this collection.
System suppliers are able to supply retrospective data and updates, which means that data in this release is a snapshot at the time of publication. The time series and monthly practice-level figures may be subject to change in future releases.
No patient identifiable or patient-clinical information is collected or available in this release.
