How to choose patient recall software

1. Follow one patient through the whole workflow

Ask a supplier to demonstrate a person with more than one due review. Watch how their tasks are identified, prioritised, combined where appropriate, assigned, booked and reconciled with recorded care. Include a patient who does not respond and a record with missing information.

Request an explicit explanation of what the software does, what a managed service does and what your own staff must do. A dashboard, a worklist and an automated invitation service can each solve a useful problem, but they leave different work with the practice.

2. Establish exactly how it uses your clinical system

• Supported system: is your EMIS or SystmOne configuration supported and validated for the proposed service?
• Access: does it read live records, receive extracts, write to records or use a combination?
• Freshness: when does the information refresh, and how is the extract date shown?
• Setup: which permissions, searches, installations and local approvals are needed?
• Failure: what happens if an extract, connection or write-back fails?
• Portability: can you export the useful work and stop the service without losing the practice’s record of care?

For AegisRX’s current EMIS service, a pharmacist runs agreed read-only searches on a weekly or monthly cycle. Your team acts on the worklists and codes care in EMIS. This is a different operating model from a service that continuously reads records and automatically writes back; choose against your actual requirements.

3. Test clinical scope and exception handling

Ask which pathways are included and who agrees them. Establish how rules are reviewed, how a clinician can question an item, and how individual circumstances affect the plan. Examine missing results, care delivered elsewhere, a recently changed medicine and conflicting recall dates.

Use the demonstration to check responsibilities for urgent concerns and unresolved cases. Clarify who reviews results and clinical decisions, who makes contact and who records completion. A useful demonstration shows an exception being resolved as well as an uncomplicated success.

4. Measure the work left with your team

Map the service to the people who will use it: reception, care coordinators, HCAs, nurses, pharmacists and GPs. Ask how it matches work to competence and available appointments, how suitable tasks can be grouped, and how failed contact is followed up.

Include time for onboarding, checking data, running searches, handling replies, coding and reconciling outstanding work. Ask about messaging and appointment-system dependencies, accessible contact methods and any additional charges. Compare the full scope and total cost in a written proposal.

5. Request evidence for the version you will use

Ask for the relevant clinical safety, data protection, security and service documents, including their dates, scope and approval status. Discuss local deployment responsibilities with your organisation’s clinical safety and information governance leads.

The NHS Digital Technology Assessment Criteria covers clinical safety, data protection, technical security, interoperability, and usability and accessibility. It is an assessment framework, not a substitute for every other applicable approval. Read the current NHS DTAC guidance.

Separate a supplier’s product description from an independently evaluated outcome. For claimed time savings or improved completion, ask for the period, number of practices, baseline, denominator and method. Check whether a figure is a worked example, a live service measurement or a customer’s estimate.

6. Agree a small, measurable evaluation

Choose an agreed scope and baseline before starting. Decide who records staff time and who checks completed care. Keep definitions consistent throughout the evaluation and note changes in staffing, clinic capacity or coding that may explain the results.

1. What problem should improve, and for which patients or pathways?
2. What is the starting workload and how was it counted?
3. Which tasks remain with the practice and how much time do they take?
4. What would count as a useful result, and over what period?
5. How will errors, exclusions and unresolved cases be reviewed?
6. What are the commercial terms, support arrangements and exit process?

A well-defined evaluation gives your team a reasoned decision even when the result is that a different service would fit better.

Compare recall services

Our comparisons with Abtrace, OneRecall and Ardens describe the service models using dated public sources. They cover clinical-system access, recall workflows, practice responsibilities and the questions to confirm with each supplier. They are written by AegisRX and are not independent benchmarks or hands-on supplier tests.

Use these comparisons alongside your own requirements and supplier demonstrations. For AegisRX, start with how the current service works and the evidence and method.