Purpose
The Medicus Online Consultations functionality can be useful for clinical triage requests that patients send through the patient portal. This user guide will show you how patients submit clinical requests from the portal, and how you can action them.
How patients submit a clinical request from the patient portal
The link to the patient portal will most likely be made available on your practice website where patients can either send in clinical requests, admin queries or request their repeat prescriptions. The times at which patients can send in clinical requests is controlled by the practice so patients can only submit these at times that a clinician is available to review them.
Selecting I have a medical request will take them through to the clinical request form.
Before they complete the form, they must enter their name, DOB and postcode so Medicus can match the form to a registered patient. If we can't match the details to a patient record we will direct the patient to try again or contact the practice directly.
Note: We require the patient to have either a mobile phone number or email address saved in their record for them to be able to submit a request. If they don't, we will display a message saying "It is not possible to submit your request online because we do not have a valid email address or mobile number on record for this patient. Please contact the surgery instead."
When we have been able to match the details submitted to a patient record, the following information is entered by the patient and submitted:
Actioning a Patient Request task
Requests come into the system as a Patient Request task and will appear in either the medical, admin or prescription request task queue depending on the option the patient selected. Tasks are assigned to the default team, which is typically staffed by clinical members who can review and triage the requests according to your local processes.
The task layout is the same as other task types in Medicus, with the task details on the left hand side and the patient record on the right.
Details of the patient request form can be seen under the Initial Request section of the task details.
From the task, you can respond to the request as required.
From the Codes and Actions field, you can:
- Type free text
- Add any clinical coding by typing a "." to code
- Complete any required actions by typing a "/" to open up the quick actions menu - for example, send another message to the patient, prescribe a medication or issue a fit note.
If you would like patients to be able to reply when sending a message, when in the New Communication modal, select Allow Replies. This will allow the patient to respond to the conversation thread until the thread is marked as resolved.
If you would like to redact the patient request from being visible via online access, you can do this within the task by selecting Redacted from patient online access.