Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Basis Belief has partnered with DrDoctor to supply a web-based portal for outpatients, lowering the necessity for paper appointment letters.
The affected person engagement portal (PEP), which went dwell on 14 Could 2024, permits outpatients at Cheltenham Normal Hospital, Gloucestershire Royal Hospital and Stroud Maternity Hospital to view digital letters about appointments on-line and obtain textual content reminders.
Zoë Blackman, communications lead at Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Basis Belief, advised Digital Well being Information: “The principle factor for the belief is empowering our sufferers to have extra management over their care, permitting them to be higher knowledgeable by way of improved communication.
“It additionally frees up our employees to focus extra on care provision, moderately than the executive aspect of issues”.
The five-year contract with DrDoctor started in 2023, with growth happening on the PEP since December 2023 and extra performance deliberate to be added all through 2024 and 2025.
Tom Whicher, founder and CEO of DrDoctor, stated: “The launch of digital letters and notifications is simply the start of the transformation journey we’re on with Gloucestershire Hospitals.
“We plan to deploy extra superior options together with two-way scheduling, direct messaging and digital assessments, plus integration with the NHS App to ship a very joined-up affected person expertise”.
In summer season 2024, the belief plans to combine the PEP with the NHS app, in order that sufferers can decide to obtain notifications as a substitute of textual content messages, in addition to introducing the performance for sufferers to alter their appointment instances on-line.
By 2025 it plans to roll out a two-way messaging performance to supply sufferers appointment instances and supply related healthcare data through textual content. There are additionally plans to introduce digital scientific assessments in 2025.
Dr Paul Downie chief scientific data officer and scientific security officer at Gloucestershire Hospitals, stated the PEP is “an enormous milestone” within the belief’s affected person empowerment journey.
“The introduction of digital appointment letters means our sufferers will not want to attend for the postie to view their appointment particulars – they’ll have the ability to entry the portal simply, from wherever, at any time,” he added.
Helen Ainsbury, chief digital and data officer at Gloucestershire Hospitals, stated the PEP “guarantees important worth to each our employees and sufferers, contributing to our belief targets and offering us with wonderful alternatives to streamline and improve our affected person expertise”.
The belief additionally labored with Synertec, which acts because the facilitator in printing, posting and now sending letters onto DrDoctor to show digitally.
To entry the PEP, sufferers might be despatched a safe hyperlink through textual content message or electronic mail, which can allow them to log-in with two-factor verification.
Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Basis Belief went dwell with an digital prescribing and medicines administration answer supplied by Altera Well being in June 2023, as a part of its five-year digital technique which launched in 2019.