PKB registers tens of thousands of patients with mass registration

Patients Know Best (PKB) - a social enterprise providing the world’s first patient-controlled health records, has introduced ‘mass registration’ enabling patients to sign up to access their health records at scale and with speed.

Following a number of successful trials in partnership with NHS organisations, patients can now sign up for their health record in a number of ways; either by speaking to a member of staff; by using the kiosk check-in screen commonly found in waiting rooms during their outpatient appointment; or by letter of invitation to their home.

Kiosk registration in one trust signed up 3,000 patients in the first month alone with over 70 completing registration every day. The automated process through kiosks also means that no staff time is taken up to verify the identity of patients.

At another trust, patients automatically receive customised letters at home. Here, PKB has seen a 25% conversion rate from these postal invitations.

Registered patients see their data from across health and social care. PKB already receives 2,000,000 data points per month from 30 hospitals across the UK, and hosts the GP records of 150,000 patients, with a further 500,000 to come by the end of the year.

More patients accessing more records also raises quality and lowers costs. Organisations sometimes worry about this transition to transparency, while paternalistic professionals feel untrained for participatory patients. However, the patients are ready to help.

Institutions typically find at least a 1% error rate in records misfiled i.e. identifiable information about one patient in another’s record. The error rates for medications and diagnoses are higher still. Institutions realise this early through pilots with manual registration as patients start finding these errors. The errors are happening before the patient sees the record, and they only stop after the patient sees the record.

In Wales, the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend has rolled out PKB across a number of departments. Through this scalable approach, we have seen a sharp increase in registration from a number of clinical specialities such as diabetes, audiology, cardiology, HIV, Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT). For patients being cared for by these specialities, PKB is enabling better integration and interaction with care pathways and transforming the way care is delivered. This was possible because of the approach to national integration in Wales where patients can see their test results for the last 10 years along with real-time updates of new results. BBC Wales also covered the significance of this launch.

In his latest vision for a digitally enabled NHS of the future, Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, highlighted PKB and the Kent, Surrey and Sussex Academic Health Sciences Network study of 4,000 inflammatory bowel disease patients, where PKB is helping Surrey to lower their costs and save £4 million in one year.

Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, CEO and Founder of Patients Know Best, said: “Clinical teams can now register patients at scale and with speed. No other portal does this. The case study highlighted in Matt Hancock’s visionary blueprint for the NHS shows this raises quality and cuts costs, mass registration gets us there faster.”

Patients Know Best (PKB) is the world’s first patient-controlled online medical records system and a multi-award winning tool to help patients better manage their care.

PKB integrates fully into England’s NHS N3 secure network and the NHS Wales Informatics Service. It is available on any internet-enabled device. It can be used by patient and clinicians anywhere in the world. It is now used by over 60 hospitals across seven countries and in 19 different languages.

By choosing who they want to share their information with, patients can work more closely and effectively with their clinical teams. For example, healthcare professionals can create care plans digitally with input from patients and data from personal wearable devices can also be uploaded to enhance the monitoring of complex conditions. Videos and other media content are also available to help educate patients and further improve care.

To find out more, visit www.patientsknowbest.com.

Patients Know Best
St John's Innovation Centre, Cowley Road Milton, Cambridge CB4 0WS, United Kingdom.
Phone: 01223 790708
Email: press@patientsknowbest.com

This release was published on openPR.