Workstreams Overview

Rolling out a Personal Health Record system at any scale requires careful consideration and input from various angles. PKB breaks down the deployment tasks into 8 equally important workstreams to help organise the challenge into logical categories, allowing activities to be planned and progress to be tracked for each.

PKB and our customers employ specialists who are best placed to collaborate and deliver on certain workstreams, so splitting out the deployment into these categories provides clarity for both teams on what is required for a successful rollout, and allows the right personnel and resources to be identified at the earliest opportunity. As part of establishing project governance, we strongly advise that all workstream leads are members of a project board which regularly meet to scope, plan, and deliver the shared plan of work.

Information Governance (IG)

Giving data subjects access to and control over the sharing of their data

As a system handling sensitive data, IG agreements are absolutely critical for any deployment. Organisations have tried and tested methods for giving professionals access to data, but giving patients routine access to and control over data is often new. It is for this reason that PKB’s own IG experts consult with Information Governance teams early in the relationship – aiding the development of new approaches if needed, and providing support for what to many Information Governance teams, appears at first glance to be a challenging new frontier.

Record Creation and Integrations

Connecting systems around the patient

How is data going to be collected and disseminated to the personal health record? In the early stages, it’s important to strike a balance between the ideal state and ease of implementation. Our integration specialists will work with your technical teams to determine which systems are to be integrated, in which order, and using which messaging and transmission protocols.

Patient Registrations

Inviting patients to claim their personal health record

Creating records and populating them precedes inviting patients. Patients rightly expect to see their information when they sign-up to a personal health record! Once the records have been created and data feeds established, registrations should immediately follow. There are a large number of options here, and not all organisations will have the means to use them all. We work with your delivery team to plan out as many of the following invitation opportunities as possible.

Communications

Informing professionals, patients and the wide stakeholders

What is PKB? What is a personal health record? What does it mean for a healthcare professional to use one in their practice? What does it mean to a patient to have their data and tools to help manage their care? These are crucial questions that need to be answered for PKB to be a success and the communications workstream is where this information delivery is scoped, planned and carried out. There is no end to the different formats, channels and messages that can be distributed, so an ongoing effort to make reasonable decisions is needed and we commit to working with our customers to guide these efforts within this workstream.

Milestones:

• Comms plan created

• Pre-comms delivered

• Ongoing comms campaign live

Expected Timeframe: 3 months + ongoing during business as usual

Additional Information: Communications Toolkit

Training

Creating in-house PKB experts

We know that healthcare professionals drive the success of a personal health record. For a patient, their care team telling them about PKB is a more powerful message than one we can ever give. We are lucky to work with incredible, visionary healthcare professionals as customers and many of whom have become colleagues, who use our system and guide us to improve it. The training workstream is where we plan and deliver our commitment to training these users, via in-person sessions, online sessions, providing a train-the-trainer model, or with our free online resource for testing knowledge and which can be used as a reference in the future.

Milestones:

• Organisation level training

• Co-ordinator and Professional Training

Expected Timeframe: 3 months + ongoing during business as usual

Additional Information: Manual and Training Toolkit

Support

Providing a service to users

Patients and professionals alike are generally not used to using a personal health record. Questions occur, and we put hard work into answering these questions proactively through improving the user experience of the system, on screen help, an online manual, and other resources. However, delivering a portal at scale involves introducing a new system to many more users than other health I.T systems, which are designed for professionals only, and there will always be some of these users that have queries for us. This workstream is our recognition of the importance of this area, and in it we help set up the most fair and effective support channels for each deployment.

Clinical Transformation

Our core mission

The current supply and demand of healthcare in every health system is unsustainable. People are living longer, developing multiple chronic conditions, which are increasingly life-style related diseases and diseases that require self-management. PKB allows true self-management by providing a patient with their record, and tools to work with their clinical teams. Each clinical team is different, with its own sets of pressures, requirements, targets, and ambitions. We commit to providing clinical expertise to support each individual team in designing a workflow with PKB that complements their patient’s pathways, and allows the benefits of digital, patient-centered, remote care to be realised.

Sustainability

Making PKB a record for life

We believe every individual has a right to their health information, and if tools exist to help them self-manage, that they should be given them. We also recognise change is difficult, time-consuming and therefore has costs. As a BCORP social enterprise, we have a commitment to reinvesting revenue to improve our system and service for the benefit of patients. We also design innovative funding models to allow healthcare organisations to pay from savings. No matter the approach, both PKB and our healthcare partners need to design a deployment that achieves benefits and allows the work to continue to truly change healthcare and empower patients. The sustainability workstream is where we monitor and evaluate this alongside our delivery teams throughout the deployment.

Milestones:

• Project governance established

• Baseline scope and schedule agreed

• Benefits tracking established

• Case studies created and published

Expected Timeframe: 2 months for benefits tracking, 10 months for case studies

Additional Information: PKB Case Studies