Patients Know Best & Somerset Cancer Register Partnership
The Somerset Cancer Register offers NHS teams and their cancer patients the Patients Know Best patient portal to complement their Remote Monitoring System.
A new partnership between Patients Know Best (PKB) and the Somerset Cancer Register will empower patients with a cancer diagnosis to have access to their digital health record through PKB and the NHS App.
Developed by the NHS for the NHS, the Somerset Cancer Register (SCR) is the leading system provider for cancer and is used by over 100 organisations in England. This new partnership will enable SCR to deploy the PKB platform – the UK’s most diverse and interoperable patient portal – alongside the SCR’s Remote Monitoring System serving patients on stratified follow-up.
Patients, along with their carers and healthcare teams, can have access to their cancer digital health record, a great step forward towards better-integrated care and remote monitoring of cancer conditions and treatments.
Test results, radiology reports and diagnosis information will be made available to the patient initially. The patient has the ability to record their own observations, write journal entries and access a library of resources to support self-care. The features will be complemented with an electronic Holistic Needs Assessment (eHNA), correspondence and activity schedule later this year. This information will be available both directly via the PKB platform and the NHS App, providing a single point of access to healthcare information for the patient.
SCR is a cancer-specific electronic patient record, hosting a rich dataset to service NHS cancer teams and organisations. The partnership with PKB will complement and expand this offering with a patient-facing element to support complex conditions and patients that also receive care from multiple sites.
David Shannon, Director of Strategic Development & Improvement “SCR is delighted to have partnered with PKB. Cancer pathways are complex and by having a single record, accessed through the NHS App, really starts to enable the patient to take control of their condition. We are really excited about the opportunities this will
present for patients’ care enabling them to have a healthcare record that is easy to use and will travel across organisational boundaries.”
The PKB model is patient-centric, allowing information to flow around patients, rather than systems or organisations. It also covers all disease pathways such as cancer, kidney disease and diabetes. This supports a patient’s ongoing care by holistically connecting data and care to and from other organisations within the NHS, social care, third sector providers, research institutions and private providers (where permitted).
Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, CEO and Founder of Patients Know Best, said:
“Disease-centric portals are not patient-centric. They don’t account for the fact that a patient may have other underlying or unrelated conditions or symptoms, which require a more holistic approach to health and care. The Somerset Cancer Register is an example of an organisation that is pioneering stratified follow-up whilst equally placing importance on the patient’s wider health and care needs. We’re extremely proud to partner with SCR in their mission to offer patients and clinicians leading-edge solutions for holistically managing cancer care.”
The PKB – NHS App integration makes it easier and more convenient for patients to access their complete dataset from within the NHS App interface. It also diverts services online to create valuable NHS capacity, in line with the requirements of the NHS Long-Term Plan to help speed up cancer diagnosis and access to treatments.
The partnership with SCR will further improve the access and exchange of quality healthcare data for better-integrated care of long-term conditions and to improve patient outcomes, across the hundreds of NHS organisations now using the PKB patient portal across the UK.
The partnership is expected to go live with its first joint customers from March 2021.
