TY - JOUR T1 - GPs online: turning expectations into reality with the new NHS app JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract DO - 10.3399/bjgp19X701333 SP - bjgp19X701333 AU - Paul Beaney AU - Anjolaoluwa Odulaja AU - Andy Hadley AU - Clive Prince AU - Ruth Chambers OBE Y1 - 2019/02/11 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/early/2019/03/06/bjgp19X701333.abstract N2 - Gaps in care provision are widening, and take-up of GP Online Services (GPOS) is increasing, but there is still a long way to go, as shown by a recent GP survey1 that highlights low usage of the service despite increasing sign-up. GPOS (the generic term for the multitude of platforms for medical record access) was envisioned as the gateway to primary health care, dually granting citizens increased control of their health and reducing practices’ workloads. However, there are still millions of patients who are not signed up, and, if those who are do not use the service to an optimal extent, it is fair to say that GPOS will not meet expectations nationally. In the current market, where online GP consultations are increasingly being sold to patients through private providers, comes the launch of the new NHS app (now in a gradual rollout phase). But what factors are responsible for the slow progress in widescale adoption and substantive variation in the percentage of the population signed up to GPOS? And how does the app overcome them? Will building on existing GPOS by simplifying the sign-up process (for practices as well as patients), introducing additional features, and overall improvement of accessibility make it competitive enough? So far, expectations and reality have not aligned, but could the NHS app be the solution waiting on the horizon?There are widening gaps in care provision, as forecast in the Five Year Forward View :2 ‘The health and wellbeing gap: If the nation fails to get serious about prevention then recent progress in healthy life expectancies will stall, health inequalities will widen, and our ability to fund beneficial new treatments will be crowded out by the need to spend billions of pounds on wholly avoidable illness.’Recent figures show that these predictions are … ER -