Vitality consultant: FAQs

This is to ensure that the appropriate Vitality members are referred to you and to ensure that you can diagnose and treat patients to minimise onward referral. Your profile should provide information on your specialty and sub-specialties along with conditions you are able to treat.

No, this cost is covered by us. Should you wish to have a full profile on the Doctify platform that can be publicly viewed then this will incur a cost which is payable directly to Doctify.

To view and edit your profile please visit https://doctors.doctify.co.uk/circle-profile/ 

Doctify is a web platform that allows the general public to search, compare, book appointments and provide reviews of Consultants. This is a separate website that is managed directly by Doctify.

Vitality has partnered with Doctify to develop the Vitality Specialist Finder to support their e-booking initiative and their staff and members, this is managed separately to the main Doctify website which you may be familiar with already.

Not during initial phase of this partnership, but Vitality plans to make the Vitality Specialist Finder available to its members at some point in the future.

In most cases patients will be given a choice of Consultants and the patient will choose based on the information available on the Finder, including the availability of appointments.

The information captured on the Vitality Specialist Finder at the point of booking an appointment includes name, date of birth, email address, postal address, telephone number, gender, claim number and membership number. All of our other minimum data requirements will be captured at point of registration in outpatients.

Yes, it is possible that the patient may arrive at their consultation without a GP referral letter.

However, all Vitality members are required to have seen either their own GP or had a virtual consultation with a Vitality GP prior to their outpatient consultation being authorised by Vitality.

Should Consultants wish to continue to manage their diaries externally and not have any new appointments on Ultragenda then no e-booking appointments can be made.

The Consultant makes a commercial decision to not benefit from the open referral opportunity and named referrals for Core Vitality Consultants will continue to be made in the usual way either via the NEC or via the Medical Secretary.

All appointments booked though the Vitality Finder will automatically appear in UltraGenda and will be visible in the App. However you will not be able to see that it was booked via the Vitality Finder platform.

You will only be able to see if a patient is an e-booking appointment via the notes section within the appointment and the identifiable information will be displayed as 'Booked via FHIR for Vitality'.

Not necessarily, the appointment time booked will be dependent on what the patient has selected as the most convenient for them, hence improving the patient experience. Vitality staff and Vitality members can choose any available new appointment.

Vitality staff and, in the future, Vitality members will be able to view Consultant profiles. These profiles will be approved by you and appear on the Vitality Specialist Finder. Therefore, it is important to ensure your profile reflects your practice at our hospitals and specialist interests.

Users of the Vitality Specialist Finder can search by location and specialty/treatment and a list of matching consultants will be returned in the search result. The order of these consultants will be subject to a confidential Vitality algorithm that is based on numerous commercial and clinical measures.

Unfortunately, during the initial roll-out phase of this project it won't be possible to record if patients have had previous scans. However, Vitality will ask their members if they have had scans previously and ask for them to bring history and scans along to the appointment.

Unfortunately, no. You will only be able to see if the patient is an e-booking appointment with the notes section of the appointment and the identifiable information will be displayed 'Booked via FHIR for Vitality'.

Unfortunately, no. All e-booking appointments will show as a new appointment.

No, the Vitality Specialist Finder does not pull this level of information from UltraGenda it searches for new appointments by consultants and specialties only.

The information displayed in the Vitality Specialist Finder is completely dependent on the information contained within each consultant profile.

We have requested that paediatric bookings are not made via the Vitality Specialist Finder and that a separate booking process is required so we can confirm age of patient to ensure they are booked with the right consultants at the right hospitals.

Vitality will follow the current process of calling our National Enquiry Centre.

If new appointments are not available for you on UltraGenda and you therefore don't have an open diary, then there is the possibility that either the Vitality Call Advisor or Vitality Member may select another consultant with e-booking functionality if it is an open referral. Named referrals for Core Vitality Consultants will continue to be made through the current process of calling our National Enquiry Centre.

This is a possibility. However, the NEC and hospital teams will minimise this impact by booking appointments for other funders and self-pay patients around these appointments where possible.

This ensures that you appear in searches conducted for your relevant location, speciality and sub-speciality. If you choose to not have a profile then you will not appear in any relevant searches through the Vitality Specialist Finder.

FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is a next-generation standards framework describing data formats, elements and an API for exchanging electronic healthcare records and data. It is designed specifically for the healthcare community and, through adoption of this framework, Circle Health Group will be able to 'talk the same language ' with our customer systems and expose discrete data elements as services to them.

Adoption of these standards provides us with market advantage of being able to offer an e-booking solution to our customers.

You will follow the process you currently have in place with Vitality but you should also update your consultant profile on the Vitality Specialist Finder to ensure only relevant patients are booked into you outpatient clinics.

To view and edit your profile please visit https://doctors.doctify.co.uk/circle-profile/ 

Users of the Vitality Specialist Finder will not be able to see consultant/clinic UltraGenda notes so patients will not be aware to arrive early for their appointment. Please work with your hospital operations team to review clinic times that require pre-consultation tests and consider creating a longer appointment duration.

This will enable patients to be advised of the correct arrival time that allows enough time for the tests to be completed.

The e-booking process does not impact this so will follow the current process.

Yes, this is highly likely but it is important to review the communication you have received from Vitality to confirm this as they have been communicating to consultants regarding core consultant status and launch of the Specialist Finder.

Doctify may have been in contact with you previously with regards to their Doctify platform which is not related to this project.

No, the paid-for Doctify platform is not related to the Vitality Specialist Finder and therefore your Vitality referrals will not be impacted.

View my Vitality profile.