January 2026 Pathology Issues Update

We’ve encountered a few issues related to our pathology update in September. We believe these are now resolved, and there’s no action you need to take, but we want you to be aware that you may find some patients appearing in reports to review that weren’t there previously.

When we updated pathology, we were trying to make it clearer which reports and patients should be reviewed. The idea was to avoid confusion and unnecessary checks in patient records. We configured the top level of pathology reports to exclude patients who didn’t have a recent relevant result or who had been coded as review in progress. We’ve recently come across a few scenarios where this change may have prevented patients from appearing in reports to review or action. The kind of scenarios where this might have occurred:

• A patient being sent a questionnaire out of sync with recent results, e.g. a patient sent a statin offer without recent lipids
• A task is sent to a clinician to review a patient, coded as “in progress”. The clinician then chooses to send a medication offer via questionnaire to the patient. The patient responds but didn’t appear in the reports to review due to the “in progress” codes.

We do not believe many patients will have been affected, but you may have noticed patients appearing in reports that weren’t there previously. The questionnaires themselves all advise patients to contact us if they don’t hear from us within a couple of weeks, so many will have already taken that step.

There are two other issues we’ve found to make you aware of:

• The statin offer questionnaire includes an option to say “I don’t want a statin, but I’m willing to discuss alternatives” – these patients may not have been invited to discuss this, though again, they may have contacted practices to arrange an appointment. These patients are now included in lists to call/discuss statins with. On that note, we’d be interested in your feedback on the change we made to the Statin Dose Increase questionnaire, which puts the onus on the patient to contact the practice to arrange an appointment. We’re considering whether to take the same approach with other questionnaires. 

• Home BP requests added to the “Request One-Off Tests” template, or linked to Low Clinic BP, may not have been chased to submit readings. Again, these patients will now be included in invites to have home BPs arranged. In working on this, we also came across a number of scenarios where either a Home BP has been submitted as a letter but not coded. Or where it may no longer be needed as the latest clinic BP is on target. We’ve built some reports that you may find useful to review patients:

We’re also wondering about a development for patients with a home BP outstanding, who then have a normal clinic BP recorded. In this scenario, it could ask the person taking the BP whether home BP is still indicated. Feedback welcome.

We’re grateful to practices who’ve flagged potential issues for us to investigate, and we apologise for any issues caused. We’d also like to reassure you that we are taking steps to identify any outstanding bugs in the system and ensure no new issues are introduced with future changes. These include…

• Growing our team – in the last 12m we’ve more than doubled the size of our team
• Getting in more expertise - we’ve been working with a very experienced Clinical Safety Officer to overhaul our systems for development and support. This includes more planning and testing of any new developments and changes.
• Developing system checks - we’ve been creating reports in folders called “System Checks” – these look for potential issues in the system. We’d appreciate it if you could run these reports and let us know if anything comes up.
• Reducing variation – we realise the ability to localise our system is incredibly valuable, but some issues have been harder to identify, as they only affect a few practices. We’re reviewing localisations to see if some can be retired. This should also improve system speed.

With this work, and your help, we believe we can continue to improve our systems and make them more robust. We want them to be effective, safe, and reliable.

If you do come across anything that doesn’t seem right, or the system isn’t performing as you’d expect, please do bring it to our attention by logging it with our support desk - Submit a ticket : Welby Innovate or emailing us – support@welbyinnovate.co.uk