The first personal health record in Ireland
Patients Know Best (PKB) and St Patrick’s Mental Health Services (SPMHS) – Ireland’s largest independent, not-for-profit mental health service provider, has gone live with a three-year strategic partnership that will give service users in Ireland digital access and control of their health data for the first time.
Our first mental health deployment in Ireland
This marks PKB’s first contract in the Republic of Ireland – and our first mental health only deployment. The service was rolled out in July 2020 to support the wider clinical transformation programme. It sees an organisation-wide deployment throughout SPMHS of the Patients Know Best digital platform – the most deployed personal health record (PHR) in the UK, designed for real-time access to shared health records.
Your Portal
Locally known as ‘Your Portal’, the platform aims to empower service users at SPMHS by bringing together information from service users and healthcare providers into one secure place. For the first time, this will provide online access to their health record to view appointment details, receive messages from their care team, complete forms contributing to their care and treatment and access links to information and resources. Service users will also have the choice to share their records with other healthcare providers or those involved in their care such as family members, GP’s or carers.
Orla Gogarty, Director of Digital Health at St Patrick’s Mental Health Services, said: “Guided by a strong human rights framework, we are committed to the development and integration of innovative, safe and reliable technologies that empower service users to access, and engage in, their care and treatment. Enabling service users to have access to their own health information in real time will transform how service users participate with, and use, our services, facilitating them to take an active role in their journey to recovery. Our new portal will offer greater convenience to service users, and ultimately enable us, as an organisation, to explore new technology-centred approaches to mental health treatment.”
Pioneering mental health care and treatments
Founded over 270 years ago, St Patrick’s Mental Health Services is committed to the development of new mental health treatment and prevention services to meet the needs of its service users nationally. The specialist hospital provides a wide range of pioneering treatment programmes, outpatient clinics and approved centres across Ireland – delivering 12% of the country’s total in-patient care and treatment needs.
Sally Rennison, VP of Sales at Patients Know Best, added: “We’re delighted to announce our partnership with St Patrick’s – a team that is serious about being digital leaders, led solely with service users at the heart of their ambitions. This aligns with our purpose and mission at PKB to empower service users and professionals with shared access to data for improved care.”
Our new portal will offer greater convenience to service users, and ultimately enable us as an organisation, to explore new technology-centred approaches to mental health treatment.”
About Patients Know Best
The Patients Know Best platform is used in more than 60 hospitals in the UK, the Netherlands and Germany. The deployment at St Patrick’s is the first of its kind in Ireland, leveraging technology-enabled services to respond to mental health service needs in the country.
Patients Know Best is a certified B Corporation and a social enterprise with a central mission to empower people with the information and tools to better understand and manage their health and care, for greater independence and prevention, no matter where they are.
