Transforming patient experience with our patient engagement portal, Patient Hub
The challenge
The Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust (RCHT) is the main provider of acute and specialist care services in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. It serves a population of around 470,000 people, a figure that increases significantly with visitors during the busiest times of the year.
Optimising referrals
RCHT embarked on an outpatient transformation programme to optimise their referrals and give patients greater control and convenience with their appointments – meaning less time travelling to hospital appointments and in waiting rooms — and better access to follow-up hospital care when needed. They implemented Patient Hub, our patient portal, to support these goals.
“Working with Netcall has been great. They’ve listened to our ideas, they’ve understood and got the vision of what we were trying to achieve in terms of an end goal.”
Claire Florey
SRO – Outpatient Transformation, Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust
The solution
When RCHT, as part of outpatients transformation, originally mapped out all the referrals, there were lots of different ways into their organisation.
Now, with Patient Hub, they have a single point of entry. They signpost each referral into different services for face-to-face, remote consultations including telephone and video and management through advice and guidance. Each referral is vetted and triaged to the most appropriate service or provider.
This was a step change for RCHT. In the past, they would have set up a different web portal per service. Now they communicate through one portal for all outpatient work, transforming outpatient services for patients.
Now, with Patient Hub, RCHT patients have all the relevant information online, whenever they need to check it. This means that the Trust do not have so many missed appointments.
Staff are freed from making sure clinic spaces aren’t empty, which used to take a substantial amount of their day. Patients get seen as quickly as possible.
Patients are now able to engage with their appointment slot, making adjustments and confirming appointments through the app. The DNA rate for those patients is half the trust’s average. It’s a significant gain for RCHT. The more they engage with patients through this technology, the less they are seeing appointment slots wasted.
RCHT operational model is now included as an example in planning guidance to support other trusts looking for case studies to implement their own personalised outpatients transformation programme.
This is a key component of elective recovery across the NHS.
“Before the implementation of Patient Hub, my day was a lot more paper based so the only way that we could tell patients about their appointments is by sending letters in the post. It’s amazing to have something that is automatically sending text messages and emails.”
Charles Webb
Outpatient Booking Coordinator, Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust
The result
A single point of referral entry has streamlined the patient journey and give the most appropriate treatment
Improved patient experience, 70% now access appointments through the patient portal
56% reduction in DNAs as patients manage their own healthcare
Using Patient Hub, our secure online patient engagement portal, with appointment management, waiting list validation and more, Hampshire Hospitals have seen a dramatic reduction in manual admin, and improvements to the patient experience.
The Trust needed a modern, efficient and sustainable digital solution that would improve interactions — by creating more capacity for patient self-service — provide a better patient experience and optimise productivity.
NHS Dumfries and Galloway is pioneering digital transformation for NHS Scotland with joined up services that improve both patient experience and sustainability, using their patient portal.