See where your GP’s time really goes

Most GP Partners and Practice Managers know test results take up a lot of clinical time, often in odd hours. Few know exactly how much time, who’s doing the work, or when they are actually doing it.

The Asterix Productivity Analysis answers that from your own clinical system data. Use it to access new insights into per-GP filing rates, callback rates and hours spent on managing test results across the practice. It’s completely free, only takes 10 minutes, and no patient data leaves the practice.

Over the last 12 months, we’ve analysed test results data for hundreds of GP Practices across the country.

We’ve found a few recurring themes:

1. Many GP Partners file test results evenings and weekends, sometimes until 3am in the morning.
2. Locum GPs are less productive than Salaried GPs or GP Partners.
3. Most practices underestimate how much time managing test results really costs them, and don’t know how to access this data.

One GP Partner of a 13,000 list size practice in North London said the following when we showed him the data:

It’s eye opening. The breakdown makes perfect sense. GPs are not business minded until they have to learn to become business minded. You don’t really account for units of time in this way… It’s a real shift in thinking.

Until now, we walked practices through their results on a call and left them with a static report. We’ve relaunched this report to give practices direct access to the numbers online. You log in, explore your data, and share it directly with your partners and team, so the whole practice sees the same picture.

Here’s a short walkthrough of the updated productivity analysis:

Get your practice’s Productivity Analysis. It’s free, takes about ten minutes of your team’s time, and you’ll have your results within a day. Request your analysis →

Why practices find it useful

Clinical admin is the work nobody schedules. Test results and documents get squeezed into lunch breaks, into evenings, and into weekends. NHS England doesn’t publish national standards either. Because it rarely appears on a rota, it doesn’t get measured.

Your clinical system does record it, though: every result received, every result filed, by whom and when. The analysis turns that record into something a partners’ meeting can act on.

Three things tend to come out of it:

You replace perception with a number. GPs have a feel for their inbox. Few have seen the total impact, across the entire team and week. A GP Partner at a 17,000 list size practice told us: “I never realised that you could get that data out.” We’re able to benchmark each practice to our national benchmark, and share insights from seeing data for hundreds of practices across the country.

You see what the work actually is. The breakdown shows how much of your volume is reviewed by GPs, and how much results in another patient interaction. Practices that use automation bots still complain about too much filing workload, and that’s not surprising: Normals don’t take up much time at all. Time is consumed by complex, abnormal results that require an understanding of the patient context and local system.

You can put a cost on it. Hours spent filing are converted into a weekly and annual cost at a fully loaded GP rate. That’s the eye opening moment for Practice Managers and Partners alike. You’ll start to think about what else could be done with that time, or how you can use it to fix other gaps the surgery is facing.

What you get from it

Your results live in a private online portal. You sign in with a secure email link and can invite colleagues the same way, so partners and managers all see the same data.

Inside, you’ll find:

• Volume and mix. How many results your practice handles each week, and how each of those are handled.
• Filing speed. The share of results filed within 24, 48 and 72 hours.
• Callback rate. How often a result leads to a patient consultation.
• Time and who spends it. Hours spent filing each week, broken down by clinician, by staff group and by day.
• When the work happens. A heat map by hour and weekday that shows how much filing is being done in evenings and at weekends.
• What it costs. Those hours converted into a weekly and annual figure at a fully loaded GP rate.
• What would change with Asterix. An estimate of the time and cost freed up if Asterix GPs took on part of the workload, with the pricing laid out in full.

We walk every practice through their results on a 30-minute call, share benchmarking and answer any questions.

How easy is it to set up?

It’s really simple, and you get full support from the Asterix team in the process.

There are three steps:

1. Run one report (5 minutes). In EMIS or SystmOne, export the test result activity for the last few months. We like to hop on a call to walk you through this step-by-step.
2. Send us the file (2 minutes). Our DPO-approved tool removes all patient data and makes the file safe to share. Send it to us via email.
3. Walk through your results (30 minutes). We take you through the analysis on a call, then you have it online to explore and share.

What about data protection?

The file you share with us contains no patient data and is safe to share. We’re happy to sign a data sharing agreement if you’d like us to, but it’s not required.

• What we receive: system-generated result IDs, the dates and times results were received and filed, the clinician who filed them, and the filing comment.
• What we never receive: patient names, NHS numbers, dates of birth, addresses or any other patient identifiers.
• DPO-approved. The tool has been reviewed and approved by our Data Protection Officer, and we’re happy to send a short summary to yours or to your ICB before you start.

Asterix Health is CQC-registered, and holds Cyber Essentials “Standard Exceeded”, NHS DSPT “Standards Exceeded”, DTAC and DCB-1596 Secure Email accreditation.

Our full governance documentation is available in our Trust Centre.

Find out where your time goes

Ten minutes of your team’s time. No patient data. A clear, shareable picture of your practice’s clinical admin workload, what it costs and what could change.

Request your Productivity Analysis →

Prefer to talk first? Email hello@asterix.health or book a 15-minute call.