Digital Care Delivery for Population Health Emergencies
- Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
- Hannah Johnson-Keck
Switching patients to PKB's digital pathways reduces usage of health care facilities. There are emergency situations e.g. hospital infections or terrorist incidents where it is important to divert patients to digital pathways at scale with speed. The instructions below are for making this happen to relieve the pressure on health care facilities and prevent harm to patients who do not need to visit a facility but do need an alternative for their treatment.
In response to the current COVID-19 pandemic, please find a high level overview of PKBs response, with links to more detailed support pages listed below.
Rapid Deployment Response
We have collated a quick summary page of the recommended key steps for you to take when deploying PKB rapidly, that is quick to digest and easily sharable with others. Please click here to find this.
Advice for Patients
We have summaried the key features a patient can use during the COVID-19 outbreak and turned them into a useful infographic - available here.
Mass record creation
As explained on this page, success during an emergency requires speed and scale of patient registration, and patients need to have a record created in order to be able to register. There are two ways to mass create these records:
Manual mass creation via a CSV upload (recommended for speed)
Automatic mass creation and updates to records via a HL7 integration (recommended for ongoing workflow)
Technical Configurations
An overview guide can be found here detailing key recommended integrations for a crisis. They focus on creating records and providing key data to support remote care, specifically:
Creating and updating records
Sending test results
Sending appointment data.
Patient Registration Overview
Please see here for a more detailed response to our recommendations at the current time.
Success during an emergency requires speed and scale of patient registration. If the patient is not registered to log into PKB to see their data and consult their clinicians then there can be no digital pathways. Registration at scale necessitates non-physical registration and therefore rolling out of new protocols to allow this.
These protocols mean tolerating a higher error rate than with face-to-face, kiosk, or home letter registration. But during an emergency the fastest way to help the most people is to register patients for digital pathways. So rolling out these protocols is necessary and the reward for patient and the health service outweigh the risks.
Communications
Effective communications in an urgent situation are of critical importance. A clear, consistent and accurate message to patients and staff alike is needed to ensure an effective deployment of a new system. Please click here to find a number of COVID-19 specific comms resources.
If you want your staff to receive their COVID test results via PKB too here is a sample text you can use to inform your staff.
Remote Care Functionality
Care Plans
PKB can assist with creating event-specific care plans when needed, that are able to be used immediately or easily adapted to local needs.
An example may be found here for the COVID-19 outbreak
Video Consultations
PKB supports various methods of remote care, using PKB functionality alone or alongside other systems. To learn more please visit the links below.
Updating Patients
Keeping all patients advised with the same message is an efficient way to manage your cohort. More information can be found on this page
Training Videos
We are always looking to increase our list of videos to aid with training - these can be found by clicking here
Telephone services (e.g. NHS 111)
Telephone services can be used for a number of purposes:
Registering patients
Triaging Patients
Delivering routinised appointments.
Guidance on the PKB configuration and the clinical protocol to support is found here.
Hospital pathways
Managing emergency pathways
High level guidance can be found here, on:
Configuration of the system for emergency pathways e.g. instructions for patients, updating welcome messages, care plan additions, and the communication comms to support roll out
Technical configuration for creating and updating records, sending test results and appointment data.
Switching clinical protocols to support changing from face to face appointments, to digital/telephone
Managing Routinised Care (Business As Usual) in a digital emergency
Please see here (under construction) for guidance on how manage you routinised care in more detail supported by PKBs functions and functionality.
Remote Working
PKB is a fully remote company and we have been working this way since 2008. Many healthcare providers are being forced to adopt remote working practices very quickly, so PKB has provided a commitment to working effectively with you.