One Care’s business intelligence team and urgent care programme are developing a new online OPEL reporting system for BNSSG general practice.

OPEL stands for operational pressures escalation levels. With the need to demonstrate general practice pressure high on the national agenda, the new system will provide a daily, data-based picture of activity.

It will enable general practice to demonstrate the pressure it is under in the same way as the acute hospitals and other providers, and will:

• support robust representation for general practice within the BNSSG system
• strengthen general practice’s position for negotiating increased resources
• help to identify practices who could benefit from One Care support

Extracted data

The OPEL reporting uses EMIS explorer analytics (EXA) to automatically extract daily information from practice appointment books, to demonstrate on-the-day demand and capacity.

The extracted data will generate OPEL levels for each practice (green, amber, red, black) based on agreed percentages. This will feed into the system-wide OPEL reporting, and trigger action cards outlining recommendations for each level. The action cards are being developed with the ICB and system colleagues.

Mitigating issues

A key aim of the new system is to identify patterns and risks early, and offer practices proactive, tailored support. For those practices under significant pressure, a range of agreed actions and interventions will be available. One Care is working with the ICB and partners to develop these.

Development and launch

The project will be implemented in phases, initially looking at capacity and activity over a rolling period to generate baseline data and trends. This will be refined over time as the system learns each practices’ patterns, and further elements will be introduced.

One Care has worked with a test practice to trial the data extraction, and is now on-boarding practices. Practices wanting to be included in, and have access to, the reporting will need to sign the data sharing agreement and switch on EXA – please contact business.intellgence@onecare.org.uk for help with this. Avon LMC is supportive of the project and encourages practices to sign up.

If you’d like to know more, please contact ruth.thomas@onecare.org.uk

You can also watch February’s webinar, covering the project’s development and planned implementation here – Urgent care programme TeamNet page