I was surprised to learn recently that some GPs and practice staff thought that BDDGP paid Argus to support general practice in the uptake of Argus. This has never been the case, nor has there ever been a financial relationship between ArgusConnect and BDDGP.

However, the Board did commit Divisional resources to support the roll-out of  secure e-messaging, because of the potential benefits of a shared electronic communication platform between general practice, specialists, allied health and hospitals.

The Board wanted to ensure that such a platform was compatible with GP software. They also wanted to avoid the risk of an incompatible product being imposed on general practice by someone else, e.g. the public health service. This strategy has worked quite well so far, and GPs can expect to begin receiving discharge summaries from BHS via Argus in 2010.

We supported Argus because (a) ArgusConnect is a local company, (b) they were the only ones who asked us, (c) it works with multiple GP clinical packages, specialists’ software, and Microsoft Word, (d) a number of GPs and specialists were already using it, and (e) it was free to general practice and competitively priced to other users. Regardless, we have no exclusivity arrangement with ArgusConnect or any other commercial vendor.

Perhaps the misconception about the relationship between Argus and BDDGP is behind the low uptake of priority support. Of BDDGP practices using Argus for secure messaging, 13 out of the 20 do not have a support agreement with ArgusConnect. While this is an individual business decision for each practice, I would urge you to consider taking on priority support.

Without this ‘insurance cover’, a practice using Argus will run the risk that any failure of its Argus message communications, whether caused by Argus, the internet or the practice network, will result in a far greater cost than expected. This is because the alternative of seeking ad hoc assistance from ArgusConnect is being charged at a premium price on an hourly basis.

The reason that the cost of ad hoc assistance is at a premium rate is because clients seeking assistance on an ad hoc basis have attention to their issues placed before clients who have paid for receiving support on a Priority basis. Argus can only do this by having additional capacity to handle incoming unexpected ad hoc calls. The premium hourly charge also reflects the additional cost to ArgusConnect for administration, documentation, billing and processing that ad hoc assistance imposes.

You can find more information on the Argus website.

Tags: argus