How do birth month invites work?

Our system is built around birth month annual reviews. But not rigidly. In our experience, moving towards birth month reviews works well, especially when medication review dates are aligned in the same way. But trying to be rigidly tied to birth month isn't a good idea either.

There's a lot more nuance to our system than simply inviting patients when it's their birth month. At the start of the QOF year, we don't want to invite patients from April birth month before the new QOF year starts. March birth month patients should be invited by early January, so there's plenty of time to send them two invites and to be seen before the end of the QOF year. 

The way we include birth months isn't linear. For the first few months, we generally add a new birth month every three weeks and then slow down for summer leave and flu season. We provide practices with an invite planner that shows which months of birth are included when and also works out what invites each individual practice should send each week.

There are other nuances built into the system:

• If a patient is due monitoring tests (e.g. for medication monitoring) our system will sometimes bring forward their annual review
• If a patient has had their previous annual review in the last few months of the previous QOF year, our system will wait at least 4 months before inviting the patients again. This avoids the scenario of a patient being reviewed on 31 March and then invited the following day because their birth month is April.
• If a patient has already had their annual review completed during the existing QOF year, they won't be invited again just because it's their birth month

Rather than sending only one birth month at a time, our system adds in birth months through the year. This means that a patient who joined the practice in August but was born in May is still invited if their previous practice hasn't reviewed them. Similarly, if a patient is newly diagnosed mid-year, though the system will wait 6 weeks post a new diagnosis like Diabetes or Asthma.

There are also options that practices can use if they want to work a little differently:

• We provide invite reports for all birth months. These can be broken down by birth month and so a practice can work ahead if they'd like
• We will soon provide reports for patients who were seen very out of sync with birth months in previous years. For example, a March birth month patient was reviewed in June one year but wouldn't otherwise be invited until ~20 months later. Our system already has safety nets to check for certain medications that shouldn't wait that long for annual monitoring, but this allows for other reviews to be considered too.

All of this nuance means that a practice transitioning to birth month reviews should find it smoother than it might otherwise be.