A whole lot of disrupting goin’ on. At The King’s Fund’s June conference on ‘Reimagining general practice’, Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) chair Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard at the opening plenary seemingly did the impossible–praising Babylon Health’s GP at Hand while wishing its destruction, along with the present UK practice payment method. First, health leaders had a ‘lot to learn’ from the GP at Hand model–and that NHS IT systems at present were inadequate in meeting patients’ needs. “‘Let’s have tech that works and use innovative ways of consulting. Because the reality is we’re looking foolish and people are looking for alternatives. The rise of the private GP health sector is not a coincidence – it’s an inevitable consequence of the NHS not keeping up.”

If you cannot beat them, join them–and figure out a new way of paying GPs. ‘[We] have to totally adopt that technology right throughout the NHS for everybody so it destroys [Babylon’s] business model and it is normal across the whole of general practice – tech tsunami stuff. Or we have to tear up the financial model by which we pay [practices]. And one of those things has to happen fast. I would suggest we need to do both.’   

Her remarks are in the face of GP at Hand cresting at over 30,000 patients, with over 3,000 signing up in May.

Both Professor Stokes-Lampard and following speaker Professor Steve Field, CQC chief inspector of general practice, pointed to a model such as GP at Hand ‘cherry picking’ primarily healthy patients rather than a broad population and destabilizing surgeries. Both agreed that the disruption had major implications for ‘the financial contracting model in general practice’.

Earlier, GPonline exclusively revealed that market research firm Ipsos Mori is investigating–at a cost of £250,000–the impact of GP at Hand, including its long-term implications for the sustainability of traditional general practice.