Essex trusts sign deal for Patients Know Best platform

Mid and South Essex Integrated Care System has commissioned the Patients Know Best platform for its patients, to support fast access to personal health care records.

The ICS has signed a three-year partnership with the platform provider which will provide patients with a single Personal Health Record across both Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust and Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust.

The platform is already integrated with the NHS App, supporting a quick roll out. Patients can start to register for the service and will be notified when new data or interactions are available.

By selecting a single digital platform, the two trusts can ensure a consistent patient experience across the region. In addition, the neighbouring ICS, North East London, also uses Patients Know Best (PKB) which will allow patients to cross borders for planned or unplanned care.

Barry Frostick, chief digital and information officer at Mid and South Essex Integrated Care Board, said: “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.”

The two Essex trusts will focus on giving patients access to their medical data, including appointments, documents and lab results, as well as providing patient engagement tools that include messaging with professionals, symptom tracking, consumer device integration and shared care planning in order to support clinical transformation workflows.

Mid Suffolk also plans to support the digital outpatients programme, including the ability to support patient-initiated follow up (PIFU) pathways and their wider elective recovery plans.

While the focus for Essex Partnership will be on improving interactions with service users through increased access to their health and care information.

Overall both trusts hope that the new platform will reduce administration work and the number of non-attendances, deliver cost savings through digital communication, and improve patient experiences and 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.”

Patients Know Best’s personal health record solutions are being supplied to more and more NHS trusts this year. Recently, Midlands Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust and Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS trust signed contracts with PKB to deploy the solution.