What can I do for you?
I attended a very interesting seminar around patient access to records. There have been far too many workshops/seminars with healthcare professionals as a focus, and listening to the patients/citizens view was refreshing, and to some degree few surprises.
This seminar had a variety of people, anything from late teens to elderly with long term conditions, and some without any kind of chronic illness. After an initial discussion on what access to patient record provides you, which was received quite well, an overall theme came out – what’s in it for me? The group was quite ‘suspicious’ on why patient access to record by 2015 was pushed as a goal by the Government, is it just because the NHS can’t handle it or are there real benefits to us citizens?
The famous JFK quote comes to mind – “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country“. It perhaps comes down to being very clear and transparent about it, yes NHS can’t cope, we need to as collective citizens do our bit to keep our healthcare system working with the ethos ‘care for all’. However, besides the financial benefits, there are citizen benefits, which of course need to be articulated much better than we have done today.
There were three main categories for people in this seminar (very simplified segmentation): under 25’s, adults with little interaction with the NHS and adults with frequent interactions with the NHS. Common to all was ‘saving time’ as a key driver for. This could be anything from appointment bookings to viewing blood results online. The group which had frequent interactions with the NHS, and were on some sort of rehab saw the benefits of uploading your own data, like blood pressure etc., the younger group didn’t at all, in fact they did not see any benefits of having access to their records. The adults with little interaction with the NHS were sitting on the fence and trying to find benefits for themselves.
A very useful session and above is a very small snippet out of a long session. This is however a good indication of some of the challenges of making citizens engaged in their own health. Whilst the patient access to records by 2015 is a great initiative, its not an end, just the means to an end. Our platform strategy with HealthVault is about driving behavioural change, the platform is ready to consume the record, but the record is used to drive the interactions. Above summary also shows that different segments have different motivational drivers, and a platform like HealthVault enables us to create different experiences suited to each segment without creating information silos.
There was one patient in the group who had a significant experience of the healthcare system, and repeated several times the need to have both primary and secondary information available to us (not just the letter sent to the GP). Not a topic I can address right now in its entire, but have a look at what we are doing with SLaM. We are fortunate to be working with Mike Denis (Director of IS at SLaM), who very early realised the need for patient empowerment and integrated care, and initiated several initiatives to enable efficiencies and better health outcomes.
. Once you have identified the patients at-risk, the question will always be – so what? The customised care pathway is mentioned as a step after the identification of patients, and the ‘not so new’ challenge has been: how do you manage this pathway using a cost efficient model including social care. The answer is to use a patient centric platform like HealthVault, which not only enables the PHR element, but also the tools needed to deliver and interact with this pathway and self help - the other side of the coin.
Arif Govani
