After going live just over a year ago, Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust’s (MTW) patient portal – Patients Know Best (PKB) – now has more than 150,000 patients registered, helping users easily access their health information on their personal devices, and access a host of features.

With over 23,000 people using the service every week, patients are able to view appointment details, appointment letters, clinical correspondence, discharge notifications and additional health information online. Patients are also easily able to request to cancel or reschedule an appointment, all of which saves them time and avoids a call to hospital administration teams.

Since launching, with patients viewing letters on the portal, this has helped keep more than 200,000 letters from print and post, saving dozens of trees and over 600,000 sheets of paper and also support patients with 10,000 appointment reschedules and cancellations being processed through PKB.

Sarah Davis, Chief Operating Officer for MTW, said: “We see more than half a million patients in our Outpatient departments every year and the portal has been an integral part of not only maximising productivity of clinics through reducing did not attends (DNAs) but also ensuring patients are able to manage areas of their own care, easily and conveniently.

“We’ve received fantastic feedback from patients such as Jane and Hannah about how it has saved them time on the phone and they really like being able to amend appointments and read letters immediately after instead of waiting for the post – all easily available by a click of a button on their personal devices.

“Although it has been live for over a year, we are still in the early days of integrating the portal, so it has been exciting to see how quickly it has already progressed and we are now looking forward to developing the service further and bringing in even further benefits for patients to take advantage of.”

Katie Bettell-Higgins, PKB’s Head of Customer Success and Clinical Leadership fellow, said: “It has been a pleasure for us to work with MTW’s excellent project team to deploy PKB as their patient portal, and it is fantastic how quickly 150,000 patients have registered.

“We look forward to further assisting the Trust in their aims to improve patient experience, cut administration costs and to increase paperless savings. There is much planned for the next 12 months, one example being that in the near future patients will begin to receive referral letters and waiting well resources into their PKB record. This should prevent patients needing to telephone for an update on their appointment status, and will provide them with digital information that will support them while they are on the waiting list.”

To sign up for PKB and find out more about the features it offers, visit MTW’s website. Patients are also encouraged to complete a quick survey to provide their feedback about using the portal.