Technology company secures NHS England funding to enable healthcare organisations to deploy patient portals
Patients Know Best endorsed as part of Innovation and Technology 2019/20 programme
Healthcare organisations will be offered funding to deploy patient portals in their areas.
The Innovation and Technology 2019/20 programme chose Patients Know Best (PKB) as an interoperable personal health record (PHR) tool and has awarded funding for NHS organisations, covering the licence fee for deploying the service through its e-Letters finance model.
As a certified B Corporation and social enterprise, PKB’s central mission is to empower patients with the information needed to better understand their health and care, along with the tools to increase self care and independence while promoting prevention.
It is great that NHS England is pump-priming new healthcare organisations in their digital roadmaps for delivering a patient portal
The e-Letters model uses PKB as the vehicle to send digital correspondence to patients, enabling significant cost savings over traditional mail services, while also increasing patient activation and offering a wider approach to information sharing across borders using a digital patient-controlled, centralised PHR.
The cash savings from patients engaging with digital, rather than postal, letters finances the rollout.
Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, chief executive 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 is pump-priming new healthcare organisations in their digital roadmaps for delivering a patient portal.
NHS England has only allocated this funding to one PHR, which is a big endorsement of the achievements of our existing PKB customers
“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.”
As the most-deployed PHR in the UK, patients offered access to their personal health records will no longer need to wait for appointment letters in the post, call the hospital to follow up on their test results, or worry anxiously about the information they may have forgotten during their last appointment.
This information will instead be available in their PKB record, along with other 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.