Based in the heart of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, The Terrace Medical Centre is a family-focused practice, prioritising the hauora of around 6000 patients and whānau in central Wellington.
In early 2024, The Terrace Medical reached out to Webtools looking for a modern solution to enhance their patient engagement. It didn’t take the team long to see how Centrik and the Well patient portal could benefit The Terrace Medical, and within a few weeks the medical centre had completed onboarding, a successful trial, and were ready to launch to patients in March.
At launch The Terrace saw an overwhelming response from patients with 20% successfully self-registering within 24 hours and, three months post launch, 50% of patients are now using the Well patient portal – all without the need for involvement from the practice team.
Using Centrik’s own Well app and online portal, patients can access their health summary, book appointments with the option to select a preferred practitioner or the next available booking, request repeat prescriptions, and send and receive messages and attachments from their GP or the clinic’s reception team.
The Terrace Medical has high usage of Centrik’s Messaging feature and integration with the clinic’s Practice Management System (PMS) means messages threads can easily be closed and saved to patient records. Practice Manager, Laura Fenton, comments, “Having the messages directly filed into the patient daily record has been a game changer. Our previous portal kept these separate and made it hard to look back at correspondence. Having the message characters limited also means that patients cannot send pages of information and requests, which means the GPs can manage these much quicker.”
Centrik has standards-based integration with the PMS using Medtech’s ALEX® API platform and adhering to HL7® FHIR® standards. Secure and event-driven, the integration ensures that only up-to-date and required data is accessed from the PMS and visible to a patient in Centrik’s Well app. Health data is not extracted from or stored outside of the PMS, an essential factor when considering privacy, security, and clinical risks.
The real-time integration also ensures appointment bookings and repeat prescription requests made from the Well patient portal appear directly in the PMS. Patients can manage their bookings from the app, with changes reflected in the PMS appointment book. They can also track the status of their medication requests, with notifications when a request is approved and sent to the pharmacy of their choice, or for declined requests, they can view the reason and book an appointment where required.
The platform’s ease of use, both for patients and for the team at The Terrace Medical, made the transition to Centrik incredibly painless. “It is easy to navigate, clean and clear. Our patients have been overwhelmingly positive about the ease of set up and, no matter the computer literacy, they are finding it so easy to use and the Centrik Support team is very responsive,” says Laura.
The incorporation of Te Reo Māori, woven into the Well app, and the ability to easily configure features within the Centrik console to reflect how the clinic operates also appealed to The Terrace Medical team.
Centrik’s modern technology is designed together with General Practice ensuring it meets their needs by addressing pain points and providing a more efficient and streamlined process to deliver patient care. With a fortnightly development and release cycle, new features and enhancements are regularly made available to Centrik subscribers, including the recent launch of Payments for script requests and appointment bookings.
