Patient tracking helps Dr Matthew Balerdi increase practice numbers by a third

At a glance 

Matthew Balerdi is a Consultant Cardiologist at Spire Hull & East Riding Hospital, specialising in cardiovascular imaging.

Dr Balerdi and his admin team have been using Semble exclusively for nine months. For his area of expertise, patient tracking, automatic communications and follow-up appointments are crucial.

The challenge: Lack of tracking leaves patients at risk of being lost to follow-up

When he first entered private practice, Dr Balerdi’s antiquated practice management system left him dealing with a lot of time-consuming guesswork. He’d inherited patients from a predecessor, but had no easy way to find out how many patients were now on his books.

This previous system was unable to track patients digitally, which meant that to get a full grasp of his practice numbers, Dr Balerdi had to deal with a monolithic manual printout.

“I wanted to find out how many patients I was looking after, but the answer came with about 50 sheets of paper. There was no way to extract the data in any electronic format, so I was flying blind for the first few years of private practice.”

“As soon as I migrated to Semble, I instantly knew the total number of patients. It was around 706. Now the count is 1,006 for all private patients.”

Matthew Balerdi, Consultant Cardiologist

Tracking patients is crucial to Dr Balerdi’s work; many require heart valve replacements and long-term care. As such, allocating follow-up appointments are key to providing the level of aftercare they need.

“It’s important that we don't lose these people, because if the valve starts to go wrong, the patient goes wrong. So it's imperative that we keep them under a follow-up pathway.”

The solution: Patient labels and automation ensure follow-up attendance

Semble has transformed the way Dr Balerdi monitors his growing patient numbers. With Semble Data, he now has instant visibility of all his patients in just a couple of clicks.

“Previously, if I wanted to track my patients or even know how many I had, I'd have to sit with a piece of paper and manually count them up. Now with two clicks of a button, Semble transforms hours of work into three seconds.

“As soon as I migrated to Semble, I instantly knew the total number of patients. It was around 706. Now the count is nearer 1,006 for all private patients.”

“Previously, if I wanted to track patients or even know how many I had, I'd have to sit with a piece of paper and manually count them. Now with two clicks of a button, Semble transforms hours of work into three seconds."

- Matthew Balerdi

Internal labelling within Semble has been key to cultivating stronger engagement with patients – a crucial step in ensuring follow-up attendance. Filtering patients by certain labels means Dr Balerdi can add automatic reminders for their next appointment, even creating appointments a year in advance.

“By applying simple labels like ‘valve disease’, I can keep track of these people through their patient pathways. It's two clicks away, rather than generating reports and then going through Excel and filtering it. It’s fantastic.

“Once they attend, they'll automatically get follow-up renewals – Semble remembers this for us, which is exactly what we wanted it to do.”

Pre-Semble, patient management was a paper-heavy process. With no opportunities to analyse key data, there was little opportunity for expansion. Over the last nine months, Dr Balerdi has seen his practice grow 30%, thanks to Semble.

“Semble allowed me to see exactly where I was in my private practice. I can see how many new patients I’m getting through, how many follow-ups. I can see what I've been paid for and what I haven't. I can then chase those payments, whereas with other systems it’s nearly impossible to do that.

“I'm all about reducing friction points to delivering care, and Semble does that in a fantastic way.”