Patients Know Best (PKB), a personal health record (PHR) platform empowering users with their health data, today announced it has reached a major milestone: 5 million registered patients.  The achievement highlights growing adoption of personal health record utilisation by the healthcare system and increasing demand from patients to actively manage their own health.

Adding over 100,000 new patients monthly, today’s scale demonstrates the ongoing momentum behind providing patients with a ‘passport’ for their health data in a single health record.  Notably, one in four registered patients actively log into their PKB account at least once a month, indicating consistent benefit for patients.  This level of engagement supports the efforts of governments, including the UK’s, to empower citizens with a national single health record system.

PKB’s platform offers a truly patient-centric approach. Unlike hospital portals or appointment portals, the PKB personal health record brings together all information about the patient’s health. The single PKB record has data from all care settings, public and private health organisations, patient-provided data and device data. It travels with the patient, throughout their life.   This unified record allows individuals to manage appointments, view documents and test results, engage with care plans, complete questionnaires, contribute to their own health information and communicate securely with their healthcare teams - all within one platform.  Crucially, patients can share their information with any individual or organisation, enabling them to become vital connectors of data in today’s fragmented health system.

In the UK, PKB is the largest personal health record platform, already contracted with 25% of the nation’s acute hospitals.  The company was the first to integrate its full functionality with England's NHS App in 2020, expanding access for a significant number of patients. This was after national integration with the Dutch government in 2019. It recently completed integration with the NHS App in Wales, initially going live in the Swansea Bay Health Board. 

The platform releases over 20 million test results every month and has processed over one billion test results to date. 

PKB’s work with multiple national governments addresses the global need for patient-centred healthcare solutions.  This demand is underscored in a newly published book, ‘Personal Health Records for Governments 2025’, co-authored by PKB’s CEO and Founder, Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, and Federica Andreoni.  The book reveals that while nearly every modern government recognises the necessity of patient data access, substantial obstacles persist in establishing comprehensive and effective personal health record systems.

Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli comments, “As a patient myself, living with a rare condition, I have always believed that patients are an underutilised member of the workforce.  If we have information and knowledge, many more of us can do more for ourselves.  It’s exciting to see the world wake up to our role.

In our early days, the idea of widespread clinical data sharing was often met with skepticism.  17 years later, the question is no longer whether to provide access, but how to do it effectively.  The fact that 5 million patients rely on PKB, is testament to the commitment of our customers, partners and importantly early adopters like Dr Susan Hall at Great Ormond Street Hospital and Dr Simon Gabe at St Mark’s Hospital who pushed for patients.  We are very grateful for their trust.’

With further data sets and functionality due to go live imminently, PKB is about to embark on an ambitious new registration and automation phase to ensure even more patients can benefit from access to their record.