Exclusive Digital provider GP at Hand is planning to take on new patients across London again, following eMed’s takeover of Babylon.
eMed UK’s president of global clinical services Dr Tim Rideout told Pulse that GP at Hand, which serves around 100,000 NHS patients in London, will again begin to register new out-of-area patients now it is no longer in financial trouble.
Babylon had indefinitely suspended out-of-area patient registrations for GP at Hand in March 2023 in order to ensure it could continue to provide care and access to its existing patients. Prospective patients were told they must live in Central Fulham – where the practice is based – to register for the service.
But Dr Rideout told Pulse in an exclusive interview that Londoners beyond Fulham should be able to register again soon.
‘It’s very likely that we’ll be opening the list wider again very shortly,’ he said.
‘You probably can appreciate that we kept it tight during the period of our acquisition because we wanted to make sure that our corporate foundations were solid. They are now that we’re part of eMed, so we can start looking at extending our patient recruitment.’
Despite the fact that GP at Hand has not been advertising for patients, it still sees a lot of interest from prospective patients, according to Dr Rideout.
He said: ‘We get a lot of people coming to us – we haven’t marketed GP at Hand for a long time, and despite that we get hundreds of applications to register every month. We know that the model is working for people, and we know that it’s attracting people.’
However, after GP at Hand had to pull out of its Birmingham operation in October 2023 – leaving 5,000 patients with no GP – Dr Rideout said it will likely not expand beyond London for the time being.
‘I think London is very much where we are at the moment. One of the reasons why we struggled out of London was because we weren’t connected with all of the referral networks and integrated care networks. We just weren’t part of them, and that’s why we struggled when we had the Birmingham practice.
‘Since then, the system has moved to integrated care systems and integrated care boards, and they seem to offer new opportunities for us to think about how we can engage in those systems.
‘But for the moment, our NHS focus – at least in terms of general practice – will be solidly on London.’
GP at Hand was first set up in 2017 by Babylon via a partnership with a Hammersmith GP practice and became the first practice in England to register more than 100,000 patients on one list in August 2021.
Following financial trouble over the past year, Babylon’s clinical services business was sold solvently to eMed Digital Healthcare in September 2023, and the company is now called eMed UK.
At the time, Babylon’s administrators told Pulse that GP at Hand was unaffected by the sale, because it is owned separately by its NHS GP partnership.
However, the service has still undergone a rebrand as it is ‘powered’ by digital health solutions provided by Babylon, which is now eMed.
Don’t you just love the speak, corporate foundations!! How about we are Cherry picking low lying fruit.