You can change the colours of PKB software to match those of your organisation and team brands.

Note: This customisation is in addition to your ability to choose the logo, header and footer artwork during your site set-up.

PKB's default branding colours are detailed here. We do not usually recommend colour changes because the standardised colours were chosen to suit the needs of people who experience problems with their colour and vision. However, if your organisation decides to use your own colour scheme, please do so carefully and carry out testing for colour and vision problems.

To set up your colours, please discuss with your PKB Project Manager.

How to provide colour codes

PKB needs the colours as HTML colour codes i.e. a series of # and six characters, e.g. #000000 for black or #ffffff for white

These are the parts you can re-colour:

Button accent The colour of the small buttons, and the chevrons within the large buttons can be recoloured.This should be a strong colour to provide sufficient contrast with the white icons.	Open
Dashboard menu and sub-page menus. The colour of the tiles on the homepage and the navigation bar. We can also change the icons to white to allow for deeper colours to be used.	Open

Things to take into account:

• Accessibility: make sure that the colour-contrast of the background and foreground is at least 3:1

• Match between your system and PKB: try to use similar colours for similar components (e.g. backgrounds, buttons, menus). The user interface should be familiar for the user.

Examples

Considerations if thinking of changing the name from PKB

There are some really important considerations to be aware of when thinking of changing the name from Patients Know Best to something else. Historically, some of our customers have done this and we have compiled their learnings below to help you decide whether to use a locally branded name yourself and if so how to do this effectively.

Largely, if you are renaming for local use, your communications campaign needs to be very comprehensive to provide a clear message to all stakeholders and explain how your local branding relates to PKB.

Explaining the system

There are multiple places throughout the system and during sign-up, where PKB still needs to be named - this is explained in more detail below. In addition, PKB is now used across multiple regions and is contracted for many millions of lives. As PKB is borderless, patients may have registered already with another organisation they were receiving care from and know PKB by the original name and trust the brand and product. This means it may have been called ‘Patients Know Best’ when they registered so it needs to be clear that whatever you call it, it is still the same system.

Registration and use of the NHS App

• When signing up to PKB, users need to accept PKB’s User Agreement and Terms and Conditions. These are required to state that the system and company is Patients Know Best and therefore users must understand, from your comms, that your branded system and PKB are one and the same. Otherwise, seeing the name PKB for the first time in the user agreement may be confusing.

• Many regions across England utilise PKB’s integration with the NHS App. If you choose to enable this, there is a huge benefit to users as they can easily access more of their health information in one place, behind a trusted front door and it is a very efficient way to access PKB. As this is a national service there is no ability to customise the name within the App so users will still see the name ‘Patients Know Best’ when they first jump through to the PKB from the NHS App and no local branding is possible here.

Ongoing usage and general considerations

• Customers who have changed their name have received complaints from both patients and professionals reporting that they are confused by the local name and are not clear that it is the same system.

• PKB is designed to be borderless, so where a patient lives and receives care (very often this can be different) doesn't matter as they can access information from all contributing sources within one record. Minimising local branding and not using references to geographical localities in the name can help reduce confusion for users and support the borderless design/concept.

• Email notifications to patients about new data in their record will come from no-reply-uk@patientsknowbest.com. You can however add your own footers to these emails when the data comes from your organisations should you choose to, to remind them of your branding. This is explained in more detail here.

• There is a Manual within the system (via the Help button) where users can access online support. This Manual is PKB branded.

• If the PKB user needs to contact our Helpdesk, this can be accessed from our Help Manual. The Helpdesk is PKB branded.

• If you are considering changing the name, logo and branding of PKB for your organisation it is worth considering what other names have already been used elsewhere. If you choose a name that has already been used by a different organisation but you have different branding designs then it will be confusing if a patient is ever to use PKB with both organisations/regions.

• PKB makes many communications resources available for use in our Communications Toolkit, however, if you are changing the name of your programme, you will need to invest more in the customisation and communication assets to align these to your local programmes.

Overall, PKB would not recommend using a different name, but rather, using your logos, and customisable options in the email notifications to remind patients of your local programmes.