The eConsult platform does not calculate the Asthma Control Test (ACT) scores for practices.

The ACT is a licensed tool owned by QualityMetric and is free to individual patients or their physicians using it on an individual basis. Unfortunately, eConsult has not been able to negotiate a reasonable fee to be granted a license by QualityMetric.

To circumvent this problem, the Asthma (Long Term Conditions review template) and the ‘Breathing problems’ template ask all five questions of the ACT.

The first three questions are the same as the 3 RCP (Royal College of Physicians) questions, which was until recently a part of QoF. That’s why the first three questions start with a YES/NO answer.

If the answer is NO, then you can assume that the answer to the similar ACT question would be “None of the time' or ‘Not at all’. We will soon be updating these questions to remove the RCP question ‘stem’.

The practice then needs to calculate the score themselves.

Written by Dr Richard Wrigley, eConsult Clinical Governance team.

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