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New Patients Know Best app

Patients in mid and south Essex are set to benefit from a new app that supports fast access to personal health care records. The app, called Patients Know Best, is available through the NHS App and has been commissioned by Mid and South Essex Integrated Care System (MSE ICS)

The three-year partnership between MSE ICS and Patients Know Best (PKB) provides patients with a single Personal Health Record across both Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust (MSEFT) and Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT).

The region strategically chose to converge around a single digital platform to create a consistent patient experience, and selected PKB for its broad range of functionality and existing partnerships together with its willingness to work with other solutions and deep integration with the NHS App.

The programme supports  the MSE ICS digital strategy to empower residents to help manage their own health and wellbeing. As such, both Trusts will focus on delivering patients access to their medical data including appointments, documents and lab results, and to provide patient engagement tools including messaging with professionals, symptom tracking, consumer device integration and shared care planning to support clinical transformation workflows.

Barry Frostick Chief Digital and Information Officer at Mid and South Essex Integrated Care Board said:

“We’re really excited to be working with PKB to deliver an integrated front door for our residents across Mid and South Essex Integrated Care System.  Recognising the importance of providing our service users with a single point of access to their clinical records our providers and wider system partners have come together to create a unified approach.  Our unified modular approach focuses initially on key services such as maternity and early intervention to provide benefits across physical and mental health service users.”

Using these tools MSEFT aims to support the digital outpatients programme, including the ability to support patient initiated follow up (PIFU) pathways and their wider elective recovery plans (including waiting well).  EPUT is focused on improving interactions with service users by increasing their access to their health and care information. Both Trusts  plan to enable data feeds for demographics, appointments, test results, letters (administrative and clinical) and clinical support information from eConsult whilst working directly with eMaternity, MSK, Fracture liaison services clinical transformation in MSEFT and Perinatal, Community COPD or Diabetes, Early Intervention Team in EPUT.

Through all these focus areas, the Trusts aim to deliver many benefits including:

  • Reduced administrative burden
  • Reductions in non-attendance and improved slot utilisation
  • Cost savings from digital communication
  • Improved patient experience
  • Improved patient outcomes

Sally Rennison Chief Commercial Officer at Patients Know Best said:

“We’re thrilled to see our customer base continue to grow, especially given all these contracts offer such well-defined areas to implement patient engagement portal (PEP) functionality using the enhanced features and clinical transformation that PKB’s Personal Health Record solution enables. Given other neighbouring regions’ programmes of work,  we are so pleased that our expansion into Essex will also provide a more cohesive digital experience for citizens crossing organisations or borders.”

The region will additionally benefit from their neighbouring ICS, North East London, also using PKB, as their patients cross borders for planned or unplanned care, enabling greater access to information for the digital record. 

Finally, to support a quick roll out and easy access for patients, Essex has already enabled the PKB/NHS App integration, allowing patients to start to register for the platform and be notified as soon as new data or interactions are available.

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