As part of plans to manage increasing demand, Croydon Sexual Health will be implementing the patient facing PHR from the UK market leader for sexual health and HIV systems, Inform Health.
A busy service delivering integrated contraception and GU medicine care, alongside HIV services, Croydon Sexual Health, part of Croydon Health Services NHS Trust, serves a rich and diverse patient group with multiple complex needs spanning medical, psychological, and safeguarding. With more patients presenting with complex needs, Croydon Sexual Health plans to harness the PHR to give patients the autonomy to contribute to their own clinical triage. This will enable the service to manage increasing demand and ensure appropriate time and resource is allocated to manage each individual patient.
Once live, the PHR will empower patients to self-manage aspects of their sexual health, such as booking appointments and ordering STI testing kits and contraception, via an intelligent and tailored triage process. Seamless integration with lab systems will also facilitate automated results notification. Combined, this will enable patients with more straight-forward care needs to benefit from online sexual health provision, while freeing up resource for patients with more complex needs to be seen face-to-face in clinic.
Jamal Smith-John, Operations Manager Sexual Health & HIV at Croydon Health Services NHS Trust comments: “Like many other sexual health and HIV services, managing the increase in demand on our services with patients presenting with complex needs can be challenging. Having our services integrated within one digital platform makes patient care smoother and safer and allows us to allocate the right resources to the right patients to deliver better patient care, while streamlining service delivery. PHR will take our digital transformation agenda into its next phase, offering a modern patient portal and updated comms system to further improve communication with our patients on their journey with the service.
Jamal continues: “We’re very excited about our new partnership with Inform Health and hope it will bring many benefits. Where patients are concerned, we’re hopeful that the PHR will prove user-friendly and enable them to get the relevant information they need quickly and conveniently, including access to appointments, results and advice. Similarly, we anticipate the PHR will have a positive impact on staff, both clinical and non-clinical, supporting them to carry out their work more effectively with an intuitive system that allows us to maintain high standards of patient care.”
Sue Bunn, Commercial Director at Inform Health says she is “delighted to welcome Croydon Sexual Health Service to the Inform Health customer community”.
Sue adds: “As the only London-based local authority commissioned service to offer locally managed online screening and e-services, Croydon Sexual Health has a track record for embracing technology to transform efficiencies, quality of care and patient access. Our partnership marks the next step in the journey, using technology to offer an improved patient experience. Streamlining activity will offer a true 360 view of the patient and support Croydon Sexual Health to respond to increasing patient demand and deliver best practice integrated sexual health and HIV provision.”
Inform Health is a specialist technology and service provider to the sexual health, HIV and sexual assault referral centre (SARC) sectors.
For more information, please visit: https://www.informhealth.co.uk/
