The ability for patients to access and interact with their health and care information are central themes running through the Five Year Forward View and Personalised Health and Care 2020. The ideal of patient empowerment and collaborative working are aspirations for every Sustainability and Transformation Programme.
Yet the clear return on investment and benefits of delivering against these initiatives have, to date, been more opaque.
Patients Know Best (PKB) is at the forefront of delivering patient and clinical portals at scale, providing a turnkey solution that is agnostic to existing IT systems and allows patients and professionals to share and connect health and care providers across borders. Here they explain the four key areas of demonstrable value from a number of case studies.
Digital patients
In-year cash-releasing benefits can come from stopping paper letters and starting patients’ secure digital access to appointments and correspondence. A typical acute hospital can save over £800,000 per year compared to posting letters. This is with just a 40% adoption, which is very quickly achievable with PKB’s unique automated home registration process, Furthermore, research has shown that when electronic reminders are used there is a 30% reduction in non-attendance.
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliance
GDPR’s requirements were built into PKB’s architecture. PKB was the first patient portal to safely and securely implement explicit patient consent; allow granular sharing of the record into general, mental, sexual and social care privacy labels; full patient-centric medico-legal audit trail, and; regional Information Sharing Agreements with patients at the centre of data sharing compliance. All these allow health and care organisations to quickly address a number of key requirements of GDPR.
Outpatient transformation
Routine outpatient appointments can be improved and transformed with a patient portal. For example Luton and Dunstable use PKB for inflammatory bowel disease management. The small team saved over 1,100 clinic appointments as a quarter of patients have routine follow-ups done remotely. Furthermore, through remote care planning there have been no emergency admissions by users of the patient portal since 2013 and it is estimated that over 240 surgical procedures have been avoided.
Surgical transformation
28% fewer patients had unplanned attendance with their GP within 30 days of discharge from North Bristol’s Major Trauma Network. This was from using PKB for an ‘After Hospital Care Plan’ and a secure messaging platform at discharge. Patient activation rose in 64% of patients, with nearly 40% changing their ‘level’ of activation. These powerful outcomes can be applied to all surgical programmes, even day cases, and be used for pre-surgical screening/assessment, information resources and post-discharge care.
Risk sharing the benefits realisation
PKB is the only patient portal provider in the UK to offer a risk sharing payment profile. By linking costs to savings from each e-letter in PKB, an organisation can deliver in-year cash savings based on reducing the need to post letters. PKB’s risk-free turn-key patient portal has the added benefit of providing better patient experience, driving clinical service efficiencies and raising outcomes.
Contact PKB on enquiries@patientsknowbest.com or visit them at Stand 237 at the NHS Health and Care Expo in Manchester 11/12 September.
