Letter Registration of Patients

What is Letter Registration?

You can register a patient using their home address to verify their identity. This is highly scalable allowing you to register lots of patients simultaneously through a mass mailing.

Why letter registration?

A trust that is sending a letter to a patient, due to the patient receiving active care, is an engaged patient and it is in their benefit to access their letters and data digitally. Letter registrations can be set up to go to patients at certain periods of their care, for example whenever they have an appointment or a new clinical team using PKB, meaning it can be a passive way of engaging patients into their own health.

Working with a hybrid-mail partner, such as Synertec, can promote further benefits for a trust such as reduction in postal cost of letters being sent to a patient and supporting the NHS Green Agenda. See how Swansea achieved this here.

How?

Every letter a patient receives can be the opportunity to promote PKB registrations. This can be through:

Token Invite letter (example) - this is usually an insert letter attached to an appointment letter which gives a unique code to the patient to register for their account or this can be sent en masse through one of our Hybrid Mail Partners at the beginning of a deployment, or at specific times to boost registration rates. You can either generate these letters or work with your out sourced mailing company such as Synertec. For information on how a patient registers this way please see here.
Invite letter with a QR code pointing patients to your website (example)- you can either do this with an insert letter or yourself by changing the templated letter to include a footer promoting PKB through the NHS login. Please see example below:

Letter footer example:

For more information, please contact your PKB team for advice.

Recommendations

PKB recommends a letter template to support patient registration, link here. Using the recommended points below, it has been found to encourage registrations and reduce patient queries about the contents.

Here are the reasons for each individual element of the page:

Printing must be on high quality paper to accurately show the codes and QR code link for registration. Patients have complained they could not register when printing was poor quality. The colour logo of the hospital inspires trust that this letter is legitimate.
Describe the benefits to the patient of your long term use of PKB rather than just your immediate short-term use. In other words, mention that you will release test results into the PKB record even if the date for release is later than the date of the letter. If patients do not know that they will eventually get their test results, they complain about the limits and ask for their account to be shut down. When PKB explained to these patients that test results would eventually come, the patients were happy and maintained their account. A large percentage of patients never register or complain in the first place when online access to letters is the only promise made in the registration letter. Patients have been trained by their banks, supermarkets and utility companies to eventually have full convenient access to their data. They do not expect an immediate equivalent from their hospital but they do need to know your long term plan.
Use a photograph and signature of a local clinical professional. Your medical director and chief clinical information officer are good candidates.
Use a QR code linking to http://www.joinpkb.com for the convenience of patients using their smartphone camera to start registering. PKB will provide the QR code from sites likeQR Code Generator | Create Your Free QR Codes so we can track usage of the codes for you.
FAQs for patients to ensure they understand what and why they are being asked to register and what is the benefit for them. Link to more information here.

PKB recommends that comms is available to patients prior to a mass registration campaign. Patients will have questions when they receive the letter. Answering these questions is easy if you have prepared in advance, and the patients will happily proceed when they trust that you trust the security and privacy of Patients Know Best. But if the patients cannot quickly find these pre-prepared answers some of them will assume there is a fraudulent attempt to access their health care data. So it is important to do the following.

Set up a link to the PKB login page from your hospital's main navigation page. Patients cannot find login pages buried deep in your navigation, nor will Google show such an obscured page when patients fail to find the page on your web site and turn to Google. By contrast if the patients find the login link on your home page they immediately understand that the record access roll-out is part of your long term work with patients and trust the letter.
Tell your phone centre and reception staff that the letter is going out. If the patient asks about the letter and staff recognise it, the patient is happy to proceed. If staff are not aware, the costs of regaining patients' trust goes up dramatically.
Start registering your front-line staff as PKB patients. Send out a mass email to your colleagues giving them instructions to register to access their records so that, even if they do not register, they are aware that patient registration is happening. Staff can then confidently tell patients that the letter is part of a wider long-term roll-out. When a staff member does register, they are much more confident about how PKB works and their confidence inspires confidence in a patient with questions that registration is beneficial.
Social Media. Having a presence on social media about PKB can support patients trusting the content.