Inhealthcare has developed a new digital service with NHS immunisation teams in England to manage the entire schedule for vaccinating children at school.
Parental consent is a necessity for school vaccinations but many NHS providers are locked into labour intensive paper-based procedures.
Routine vaccination rates are falling, according to Public Health England, and the UK lost the World Health Organisation’s measle-free status this summer.
Inhealthcare, a UK leader in digital health and remote patient monitoring, is working with four NHS trusts across England to digitise the immunisation schedule from beginning to end.
The service offers:
- Fully online self-enrolment using NHS verification
- Nudges for parents to encourage uptake
- Managed triage of children with needs and conditions
- Paperless immunisation session management
- Auto-syncing to GP systems.
Benefits include reduced risk, improved accuracy and reliability of data and thousands of hours saved in administrative tasks, allowing experienced staff to focus on working with more vulnerable groups.
Bryn Sage, chief executive of Inhealthcare, said “With national support, this innovative approach to vaccinations could be rolled out quickly to all regions to streamline the immunisation process, provide new insights into take-up and most importantly increase participation.”
“We are proud as a UK technology company to be supporting the NHS to protect families and communities from infection and illness.”
An NHS trust in south-west England is the first to have launched the new service. Its vaccination campaign runs until December and has initially targeted schools where rates have historically been very low.
The service, which started in early October, has already gained consent from more than 16,000 families in a cohort of 56,000 pupils to date.
Last year, the trust required 16 staff to manually collate paper forms and duplicate this information into clinical records.
The trust is confident that acceptance rates will exceed last year’s vaccination rate of 63 per cent over the course of the campaign.
Inhealthcare is working with three other NHS trusts to develop the service to support local needs and working practices.
For further details please contact bryn.sage@inhealthcare.co.uk
