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NHS England Stimulates Use of Patient Portals to Improve Service and Patient Experience

It is a good time for non-specialist acute trusts who aim to provide their patients with a patient portal in 2023-2024. NHS England provides revenue funding for those trusts ready to procure a portal or extend the functionality of existing solutions.

Improved Services for Patients

Broadly speaking, NHS England wants to improve the patient experience by providing patients with the option to make or manage appointments and receive messages from the trust digitally. In a letter to NHS directors, NHS England has listed four main requirements.

The patient portal should:

• enable patients to view their outpatient appointments through the portal;
• enable the trust to send a waiting list validation questionnaire to patients through the portal;
• provide patients with single point of access to contact the provider inc. cancel appointments;
• and enable patients to access their correspondence through the portal.

Ideally, patient portals should be integrated with the NHS App to further improve functionality regarding booking and eForms.

Proven Benefits

Trusts currently using a patient portal report a wide range of benefits, including reductions in DNAs and cost/time savings from digital letters. Improved surgical pre-assessment flows led to reduced requirement for face to face appointments (see this article by HTN). Besides benefits in numbers, there is also the benefit of patient empowerment by providing a patient with access to their own data and giving them the tools to participate more actively in the care process.

Also, a systematic review published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research concluded that patient portals “have the potential to enhance the doctor-patient relationship, improve health status awareness and increase adherence to therapy”.

A Patient Portal and Mobile App as a Service

In short, if your trust currently does not have a patient portal  (or one that does not provide the minimum functionality requirements) there are huge benefits to deploying a patient portal – and NHS England’s announced revenue funding certainly helps.

Enovation Funatic provides a modern, user-friendly, proven solution: a patient portal and mobile app as a white label service, branded to your organisation. It has been created to support your patients during the entire patient journey.

Would you like to know more about how Enovation Funatic can support your trust and its patients?