Harvey Group Practice

Eliminating Downtime

January 2022

Harvey Group Practice provides services across two practices in the St. Albans area covering nearly 15,000 patients. As an accredited Health Education England Training Practice they meet the high standards of care set, allowing training of medical students, physician associates, and doctors in their foundation and specialist training years.

January 2022

The Challenge

Dr Mike Walton, GP Partner at Harvey Group Practice, explains that their "old legacy on-site PBX would often crash and the practice would experience a lot of downtime. They had no way to work remotely and no call queuing facility was available." For many practices still on legacy systems the advent of the COVID pandemic quickly highlighted the need for a modern flexible GP Advanced Telephony system, enabling remote working and with full control of all aspects of practice communications.

Mike points out that Harvey Group Practice were "looking for a reliable system; the features they wanted were call recording and a way of identifying good practice by listening back to calls for training and monitoring purposes."

The Solution

Surgery Connect is a cloud based system providing the highest possible levels of flexibility and scalability; not achievable with any on-site legacy system. Development of Surgery Connect has been driven from the ground up by feedback from healthcare professionals using the system, and engagement with some key individuals through the years. The system is constantly being improved with new features and updates deployed to customers without charge, included in the monthly rental. This is completely removed from a legacy environment requiring chargeable on-site visits for repairs and upgrades. As Mike observes, the practice is "impressed with the user driven development that is then implemented in a nimble and methodical way."

X-on ensure that the switch from a legacy system does not affect patients or staff in any way, with a "seamless transfer over, easy to use after go live and good service after."

The Surgery Connect softphone, embedded within the User Console provides full Surgery Connect integrated telephone functionality, including seamless video conferencing capability. The softphone ensures that remote working does not impinge on patient contact in any way: "Softphone is great. The home working facility allows you to be flexible and gives greater freedom of movement."

Additionally, Mike highlighted that "the integration with EMIS is great, along with flexible remote mobile working, the possibility of scalability, sharing resources with neighbouring practices (across the PCN), and excellent customer support."

Surgery Connect is available on a monthly per user rental, including call costs and all upgrades: "Great value for money, the practice pays less for calls and saves money on ISDN costs."