Sustainable health and care records
Patients Know Best (PKB) is a Net-Zero provider as of 2021, years ahead of the national targets set by NHS England.
We’re committed to developing pioneering health and care technology that is sustainable for generations to come. Alongside our commitment to our own footprint, PKB continues to support its userbase to reduce the environmental impact associated with the delivery of care for patients, professionals and health economies.
We’re well on our way to supporting the NHS to achieve the ambition ‘for a greener NHS’ with net carbon zero. As a B-Corp Social Enterprise we are continuing to work hard to reduce our own carbon footprint and improve our platform to support healthcare.
Our platform enables health and care providers to deliver a secure, digital solution to their patients for better communication and self management, all while reducing carbon emissions and providing a more sustainable service. Starting with the immediate impact from reducing the number of printed letters and avoiding unnecessary face to face appointments, to our broader aim of providing patients with the tools and data to self manage and self care. By empowering patients with access to their data, and by giving people the ability to take a more active role in the care they receive, we’re supporting preventative care, rather than reactive treatment, enabling care to be delivered closer to people’s homes. These efforts ultimately lead to a decreased need for hospital attendances, surgical procedures and emergency department admissions - driving the biggest impact for the NHS’s sustainability and environmental footprint.
Making paper obselete
PKB allows patients to store digital versions of their health record and to receive and exchange data with health and care providers. This substitutes the use of paper and printing, helping to make paper-based health records obsolete.
PKB provides the facility to allow patients to receive digital correspondence from their healthcare providers making it more efficient, quicker, safer and cheaper, reducing the amount of paper required and the associated printing/posting costs. The platform also enables healthcare teams to provide a lot more of their paper resources digitally such as leaflets and documents. This means the patient always has them to hand wherever they are and knows they are the most up to date version.
The number of digital letters read via PKB from the trust remains consistently high, with over 81k letters read digitally before the postal date in the last quarter. With a postal letter costing 37p on average compared to the digital upload cost of 6p per letter the trust is saving more than £25,000 each quarter.
"We’re so pleased to see the huge effect that using Patients Know Best is having. With our patients now able to access their correspondence digitally, we have been able to send out 70,000 quarterly letters without printing them physically and posting them.
Having the ability to access appointment letters via PKB and the NHS App has helped to avoid these not being read, and in turn has huge financial and environmental savings for the trust by not having to print and post, as well as reducing our DNA rates.
Overall - this is better for our patients, our professionals, our organisation’s finances and, aligning with our green agenda, better for the planet too."
As of the end of 2024, PKB has supported over 4.6 million letters being sent digitally, rather than physically, avoiding 222.88tC02e.
Reduce face-to-face consultations
At Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust they identified an opportunity to enhance efficiency by implementing a digital pathway for data collection, which would enable certain assessments to be conducted over the phone or eliminated altogether. Prior to the implementation of the new digital pathway, the trust would arrange a face-to-face appointment with every patient going through this pathway. Through PKB, the trust is able to analyse these questionnaire responses, enabling the service to avoid 163 face-to-face appointments as patients didn’t need to be seen ahead of their procedure and swap 133 face-to-face appointments to phone calls (avoiding a total of 296 face-to-face appointments taking place). Every avoided outpatient appointment has the ability to avoid 6.94kgCO2e. More details can be found here.
As a result, this pre-assessment pathway saved 2.1tCO2e over an eight month period from 1st October 2022 to 30th June 2023. During this same time period, the trust avoided sending 183,258 physical letters across their entire patient population, avoiding 8.8tCO2e.
Facilitate self-care
A team at Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust (HDFT) is transforming post-operative follow-up care by utilising PKB’s messaging service to send personalised video messages to patients. Traditionally about 50% of patients require clinical assessment around 4-6 weeks after surgery. The remaining cohort, however, are seen for reassurance. The pilot assessment indicated that using the video model meant only about 15% of this reassurance cohort would still need a follow-up appointment versus 75% using the legacy approach.
Humber and North Yorkshire’s Innovation, Research and Improvement System calculated the post-innovation savings:
- 67% reduction in post-op follow up within the Knee Arthroscopy team.
- 10,800 clinical minutes saved, releasing 285 new patient appointments.
- Based on 720 appointments avoided so far, including the avoided travel to and from the appointment this translates to an estimated 12.78tCO2e saved for just one surgical pathway within the trust.
Read the full case study here.
Medical data accessible to self manage
"Patients being enabled to see their own results empowers them to manage their own condition. It also allows us to design remote management pathways meaning that patients will no longer need to come to the hospital regularly. This is better for the patients and better for the NHS; having patients who have already seen problem-results mean they are prepared for the discussion we need to have."
Sustainability powered by a clear social purpose
To recognise our ambitions as an innovative social enterprise that empowers patients and joins up healthcare information, we became a Certified B Corporation in September 2015. PKB is featured in the list of businesses that earned scores in the top 10% of more than 2,500 Certified B Corporations globally on the B Impact Assessment. The assessment measures a company’s positive impact on its workers, community, customers and the environment.
B Corp allows us to demonstrate and achieve our social mission across the world.