Patient portals are an inevitable part of the modernisation and digitisation of healthcare. They are an opportunity for people to access and manage their own data, and the NHS, GP services, and other organisations are keenly pursuing these avenues to empower the public.
At The Access Group, we’re keenly seeking new opportunities to help with our software solutions. There are many possibilities for how a patient portal could be integrated with other tools such as electronic patient records, a mood diary, and even home monitoring kit.
With this in mind, we have delved into patient portals: what they are, examples of their implementation, and the pros and cons of using such digital avenues in healthcare.
Improving patient engagement is the big aspiration for healthcare services around the world. In this digital age, people are already interacting with numerous other services in their lives, and that engagement or accommodation is desirable – after all, it’s providing greater knowledge to a person managing their affairs. It’s empowering them to make better decisions.
In our previous articles (Patient Engagement explained, Patient Engagement strategies) we discussed what patient engagement is, why it matters to both patients and clinicians, and how healthcare organisations – public or private - are approaching this challenge.
In this fifth and final article in the series, we delve into how to increase patient engagement, and nine ways that healthcare providers can achieve better interaction with patients to ultimately improve care outcomes.
With modern healthcare striving to be ever more inclusive and accommodating of patient needs and wishes, digital patient engagement platforms are rapidly seeing an uptick in usage by healthcare services and providers.
The point of these patient engagement apps is to get patients onboard with their own care. Research shows that patient activation leads to better care outcomes, because a patient both understands the care they are receiving but also feels like they have control over the approach to their treatment or care.
As more solutions become available it will become more important to assess the quality of these solutions. Before that though we need to explore the technology at hand and the companies offering these solutions. In this article we will do just that, making you better equipped for future patient engagement decisions.
Patient engagement is an important process within modern healthcare. In our last blog, Patient Engagement explained, we discuss how actively consulting patients and their families, including them in their care plans, and offering them choices for their treatment and care has been proven by research to generate better patient outcomes – and to benefit healthcare providers.
There are considerations to be had during the measuring process. Patient data is protected by strict privacy laws, so confidentiality must be kept. Similarly, storing captured data properly is crucial – both for security but also for repeat usage and analysis in the future. Analysis also requires sufficient detail for the data to be useful; things like demographic information and patient type, so that trends can be derived.
By measuring patient engagement, healthcare providers – public or private – can identify areas that can be improved upon within their care provision. They can also highlight the patient successes too, correlating the engagement levels with care outcomes.
Patient engagement measures are crucial for patient activation and onboarding them in their own care. In this blog we explore what the goals are for patient engagement, how it is measured, and the tools used for measuring patient feedback and turning that into presentable data.
Virtual reality (VR) simulations initially started out as military trials in the 1960s, before branching out to public medical trials in the 1980s. The tech never died off due to a lack of interest, but stayed relatively dormant until the world around it advanced enough to properly enact the vision and potential.
That world is here now, and VR has grown in popularity in the past decade thanks to these rapid improvements in the technology, becoming a playground for gamers. Players put on a headset (or head-mounted display) and connect to a console or computer for their immersion, but VR could have benefits in other aspects of life.
Virtual reality healthcare is one such area. It might seem odd to pair virtual reality and healthcare, but there are avenues such as mental health care where the ability to safely explore and experience could be beneficial to treatment and recovery.
In this article we explore the use of virtual reality in healthcare; the specifics of what VR can do, how it can help patients, the challenges it poses, and the cost to implement this new technology – and whether the benefits warrant the investment.
Co-production might be a concept you are aware of if you work in either healthcare, social care or related services. Co-production has been growing in popularity over the years. It is an approach to find new ways to collaborate and exchange both training and resources to help deliver better person-centred care.
However, due to the pandemic a lot of local authorities and NHS Trusts stopped using a co-production approach due it taking time, money, and often there being mixed opinions within a team on what would benefit the community.
Now it has started to become a priority again with more and more local authorities looking to use the approach. But, how can it be implemented again without the problems that occurred before?
An NHS trust or local authority needs to ensure it is putting its finite budget to the best possible use. This means that when it comes to virtual wards and establishing the Hospital at Home practices, they need to know who the best virtual ward providers in the UK are at present.
This is difficult though, because nobody can give a clear, universal definition of what a virtual ward is. We’re learning what a virtual ward can do in terms of the care it can enable and support, but we are early in the development process which in turn makes it tough to list providers – including The Access Group – in order to compare and contrast what providers can do and which may be the most suited to your needs.
What is patient engagement? Patient engagement is when a patient is actively consulted and offered choices in their treatment and care. This will often involve healthcare professionals, carers, and the patient’s family all working together for the best outcome.
Patients are treated by healthcare professionals, but engaging patients more in decision making, treatment options and behavioural or lifestyle changes can be very effective. Research shows engaging patients in these ways can allay fears, reduce costs and promote better recovery.
The patient engagement definition can be confused with patient activation, so in this article we explain patient engagement in healthcare, the importance of patient engagement in healthcare, and the benefits – providing patient engagement examples to demonstrate the importance of patients being involved in their own care.
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Virtual wards are the future of healthcare. Hospitals will always serve as the reliable, tangible support system but they are not always the best solution. Research shows that patients recover quicker at home thanks to the reduction in stress and the reduced chance of contracting illnesses from other patients.
Steady progress is being made nationwide in the rollout of virtual wards, and The Access Group is already supporting virtual wards or ‘Hospital at Home’ with our remote monitoring software and Rio electronic patient record system, but virtual wards funding and virtual wards technology are just two parts to the assembly of these wards.
All wards are only as good as the healthcare professionals that staff them. It is their expertise and their commitment to patients that make a ward successful, but the performance and competency of healthcare professionals will have an exaggerated impact upon virtual wards in their earliest days.
This is why it is important for the NHS to establish a well-rounded virtual ward, with a multidisciplinary team (MDT) to provide a broad scope of knowledge and clinical skill to ensure excellent care continues to be provided, if not improved upon.
Virtual ward technologies are a combination of hardware and software solutions that work to better enable healthcare professionals in their goal of healing people.
Hardware typically includes forms of home monitoring devices. These can be a hub, such as what The Access Group provides, but also plug-in sensors to check for movement when monitoring patients with mobility issues or Alzheimer’s for example, or perhaps wearable tech. This would include finger monitors for oxygen saturation and pulse, or blood pressure readers, or armbands to check the heart rate, fluctuations, and more.
Virtual ward software solutions play the link between the hardware and clinicians, but can also be an aid directly to these clinicians. Software can record, store, and communicate patient information – vitals or other records – between different healthcare services. Software can also help determine what sort of virtual ward care a patient needs, which staff are best suited or most available to assist, and even how to coordinate with other home visitation teams; useful in cases where a patient already receives domiciliary care.
