Patients Know Best has secured central funding as part of the Innovation and Technology Programme (ITP).
In April 2017, NHS England launched the Innovation and Technology Tariff (ITT), an initiative designed to reduce the financial and procurement barriers experienced by commissioners and providers wanting to adopt innovative technologies in the NHS.
This funding for the Patients Know Best platform provides healthcare organisations with support to deploy a patient portal in their area. It includes covering the licence fee for implementing the service.
Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, CEO and founder of PKB said “NHS England has only allocated this funding to one PHR, which is a big endorsement of the achievements of our existing PKB customers.”
“It is great that NHS England are pump-priming new healthcare organisations in their digital roadmaps for delivering a patient portal. It also supports our mission as a social enterprise to empower patients to take control. We’re thrilled as this helps us to bring more data, more quickly to more patients.”
The solution means patients can have correspondence sent to them digitally, access vital data including their personalised care plans, medications and diagnosis information, along with the ability to remotely share this data in real-time as clinically required.
Dr Zoe Warwick, Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust, an advocate of Patient Know Best said “PKB goes back to some basic principles of mine – which is why I saw it had such potential. Medicine can be very paternalistic – we hold all the records, we write about patients, they don’t own their records and have to apply to have access to their records – I’ve always felt that’s wrong.”
“Sometimes in the NHS we know we can’t really solve the big problems in the system – so we find workarounds. PKB wasn’t like that. It could potentially solve a very big problem. It gives us the potential to work differently and that was the thing for me that kept me advocating for it and persisting.”
“My patients can differ extremely. There are those who are very vocal and well informed – they want more control and PKB gives them that. But there’s another group who are the opposite. They’re very disempowered and disconnected from mainstream society. They might not instantly engage with PKB, but they have the potential to benefit from it hugely because they desperately need to have more control over their care.”
