I should perhaps start by saying that I’m a zealot for transparency. We live in a world where what is not open is assumed to be corrupt, biased, or incompetent until proved otherwise. We may not like it and it may not be fair—but it’s how the world is. But the benefits of opening up data go way beyond avoiding the negative, particularly for science.

Steve Smith, formerly of Imperial College now something important in Singapore, said how the life sciences are moving into a whole new age based on large scale crunching of data. Making NHS data available can ensure that the UK stays at the forefront in life sciences. John Bell, regius professor of medicine in Oxford, quoted Richard Peto (Britain’s foremost epidemiologist and “son of Richard Doll”) as saying that Health Episode Statistics (HES), a standard output of NHS activity, have improved so much in the past five years that they are now better for observational studies than anything produced in Sweden, Canada, or other countries well known for the quality of their routine data. Then the NHS includes pretty well everybody in Britain, and the demographic mix of the country makes the data still more valuable. Some of the data—genetic data, for example—are valuable, however, only in the context of having data from everybody, pointed out Bell. It’s important not to have many people opting out, and the people at the dinner favoured an opt out rather than an opt in system.

Transparent data also has the potential to transform health care. Everybody will know what individual doctors are doing, said Bell. If they are practising in a poor way they’d better watch out. Public health as well can be transformed by open data, said Sally Davies, England’s chief medical officer, particularly by “mashing” data in new and innovative ways.

Ian Carruthers, a senior NHS manager, has been chairing a working party on how to diffuse best practice through the NHS, a long standing problem, and he believes that open data can help. It can also, he thinks, promote innovation, save money, and encourage patients to play a more active part in healthcare.

Much of the innovation is expected to come not from within the NHS, but from entrepreneurs who will create unimagined and magnificent products and services, at least some of which will be exportable. Tim Kelsey, the founder of Dr Foster and now “transparency czar” (“Can you see through him?” somebody asked me), is the living example of an entrepreneur who created a successful business and helped advance the health service when given access to HES data. The government hopes fervently that where he has led others will follow, using not just health data but other government data as well. Indeed, it’s the economic prospects not surprisingly that seem to most excite the government. One of the senior people from Quintiles, the world’s largest “pharmaceutical services” company, would be able to create a thousand jobs with new access to data.

So who could possibly stand in the way of this train to the promised land? The media, patients, and doctors are three possibilities. “Animal test firms given your NHS data,” screamed a front page article in the Sunday Telegraph at the beginning of the month. The headline was carefully constructed: “your data” brings in all of us and shows who owns the data; “given” implies that taxpayers aren’t getting the return  they should; linking “firms” and “NHS” plays into traditional fears; and concentrating on animals rather than people recognises the priorities of the British.

With the Leveson inquiry into the behaviour of the press underway and the phone hacking scandal still unfolding, privacy is high on the public agenda, and so this may not be an auspicious time for “giving away” patients’ NHS data. Do you want the Sun newspaper to be able to find out that your daughter has had three abortions or that Uncle Harry’s strange ways are the result of syphilis? Of course not, and there is a job to be done to reassure the public that such revelations will not be possible. Nicolaus Henke from McKinsey said that there was a need for “sharper arguments” on the case for change, and somebody from Scotland, which as usual is further ahead than England, said that it was essential to focus on benefits to patients; benefits to research and the economy should come second.

Several people pointed out that people seem quite willing through loyalty cards to give away huge amounts of information about themselves to Tescos and other organisations in exchange for paltry rewards. What can the NHS offer? Something more concrete than “better care”?

The other group who can get in the way are doctors, and while Bell may welcome a new age where no doctor can hide his or her poor practice many doctors won’t. Eschewing the applause that followed upbeat comments, various people pointed out the importance of getting doctors, particularly GPs, onside.

As I said at the beginning of this blog I believe in transparency of data, and I hope that the new age arrives soon bringing all the promised benefits. But one of things I’ve learnt over the years is that it is a good strategy to “underpromise and overdeliver.” The reverse can be catastrophic, and which recent enterprise exemplifies that? Connecting for Health. Let’s hope that this government initiative is more successful, and it might be wise to throttle back on the rhetoric.

Competing interest: RS ended up at the dinner as a second choice, as he discovered did several of the people around him. The dinner was too small, and he had to have a cheese sandwich when he got home. RS works for the UnitedHealth Group, a company that is very strong on processing and using health data and may benefit from the opening up of NHS data. He works, however, on a philanthropic programme and is unlikely to benefit directly from anything that the company might do with NHS data. RS is also the chair of Patients Know Best, a start up that uses information technology to enhance the patient clinician relationship and might benefit from increased transparency of NHS data. He is not paid but has equity in the company.

Personally, it is a real honour for me to finally work with Tim. I still remember reading two papers that he wrote for in the BMJ back in 2002. They explained why UK GPs had led the world in the use of electronic medical records, and why hospital doctors were so slow. (The answer, by the way, is incentives and scalability.) The articles came out shortly after I had finished my first year as a doctor, working in a hospital and in a GP surgery, after years of writing medical software. It beautifully answered a question that had puzzled and troubled me. Tim is regularly able to do this as a gifted teacher, and as one of the most experienced health informaticians in the UK.

In working with howRU, we hope to quickly and easily show clinicians how well their patients are doing. This is something they are desperate to know in a timely and accurate manner, but which they cannot do in rushed clinic appointments. For those who pay for care, including governments and insurance companies, this is a great way of finding out which of their patients are getting the best care. And for patients, this is an easy way to monitor their own health and share this information with their loved ones.

Patients Know Best links up with howRU

Patients Know Best has announced a partnership with Abies Ltd so users of its online medical records system can use the howRU patient reported outcome measurement tool.

HowRU is an online tool invented by medical computing pioneer Tim Benson that measures and analyses how a patient feels on a day to day basis.

Using a simple graphic interface, patients can log how they feel physically and mentally and how much they can do in terms of loss of function and dependence each day.

Patients Know Best says that incorporating howRU will give clinical teams more information about their patients’ health and wellbeing – which in turn will improve the level of care that users will receive.

The tool will also enable closer monitoring of patient care at particular institutions and more effective research into the health and happiness of patients with particular conditions.

Patients Know Best founder and chief executive Mohammad Al-Ubaydli said: “When you’re asked ‘how are you?’ it’s human nature to say ‘fine’ – even when you’re not.

“The real power of howRU is that it gives clinicians a real-world view of how their patients are feeling on a day to day basis – and then tracks this over time.”

Tim Benson, founder of Abies Ltd and howRU said: “It’s tough to remember what you had for dinner a week ago let alone how you were feeling.

“HowRU provides a rapid and easy way for patients to capture this information – which in turn provides clinicians with more detailed view of how people are living with long term conditions.

“My vision is for howRU to be ubiquitous and to be adopted as the standard way that patients track and report back their healthcare experiences. Our integration with Patients Know Best marks an important step towards achieving that objective.”

But one big benefit we get is in recruitment. People want to join social enterprises because of their focus on social impact, and that means we get lots of high quality candidates. And we are hiring! So drop us a line if you want to help patients know best.

‘What is your job?’ asked a reporter to a cleaner working in NASA in its early days. ‘I am helping to put a man on the moon!’ replied the cleaner. Photograph: AP

There’s been much debate recently about how we as a sector should explain ourselves and whether it’s even worth mentioning that we are social enterprises at all. Should we search for an all-encompassing phrase to use or should we forget about the term ‘social enterprise’ altogether and just think of ourselves as part of the private sector? For me, both of these questions fall wide off the mark. I believe that how you use ‘social enterprise’ should depend on the objectives of your business, your market, your growth strategy and overall, whether it’s beneficial for your brand. Each entrepreneur must decide for themselves. At Patients Know Best we use our social enterprise status as a way to find and recruit great people – but we hold back on using it when we first pitch in our software to a client. So why is this?

“What is your job?” asked a reporter to a cleaner working in NASA in its early days. “I am helping to put a man on the moon!” replied the cleaner – it’s this same sense of mission and common purpose that makes social enterprises like ours so powerful at recruiting and retaining employees. At Patients Know Best, everyone on the team knows that our name is our mission. Our software puts patients in control of their medical records, so they can understand and then manage their own health care. Since we started in 2008, we have seen a considerable increase in the number and quality of candidates asking to join us because we are a social enterprise. They believe in the mission and they want to help make it happen.

However, despite using our social enterprise status to recruit, we rarely mention that we are a social enterprise to customers – indeed, when they do find out and they see that we’ve won many awards for being one they’re often pleasantly surprised. But they don’t find out from us. There are two reasons for this.

First, there’s still a lot of ambiguity in the sector about its definition and there are a plethora of different legal definitions. This can be confusing to potential clients. When working with high profile customers like Great Ormond Street Hospital, UCL Hospital and Torbay Hospital, we prefer to focus the conversation on the social impact of putting patients in control of their records – not on our legal status. That’s what impresses these clients – not the fact that we are a social enterprise. Some of the competitions such as Unltd’s Big Venture Challenge recognise that social mission and social impact is more important than legal structure – and it is great to see this reflected in the winners they chose.

Second, the ambition, potential and scalability of social enterprises are often misunderstood. There’s a lack of confidence in some areas that we can be an alternative and that we can offer real competition to traditional, private sector businesses. That’s something that must change. For example, last year, Patients Know Best applied to an international competition whose organisers claimed they wanted the best, the most ambitious and the most scalable social enterprises from all over the world. The judges were impressed with our achievements – which was great – but decided not to take our application further because they thought Google Health was too much of a competitor. They were worried that we’d never be able to compete against one of the largest companies in the world – but why not? I say we can compete. In the meantime, Google has shut down its health business and we have been growing, signing up large pharma company Novartis, teaching hospital St Mark’s and patient charities as customers because our software works globally whereas Google’s product could not.

Each social entrepreneur must decide for themselves when, how and in what circumstances it is right for them to send a strong social enterprise message – and that depends on what objectives you have, what market you are servicing and where you see your business heading in the long term.

In fact information technology already has improved healthcare and much of what is done now could not be done without the technology, pointed out Patrick Carter from McKesson, one of the world’s largest logistics companies, at the Cambridge Health Network meeting in London last week. But, he continued, the industry has “overpromised and underdelivered,” destroying trust.

And nothing did more to destroy trust than Connecting for Health, which spent billions achieving very little. “It sterilised innovation for years,” said one member of the audience. Leaders in healthcare are reluctant to invest in information systems that may not deliver a financial return or may take years to do so. We remembered how five years ago the leaders of Connecting for Health were being invited to tour the world talking about the remarkable things they were doing. Now those who have survived the wreckage are invited to talk on how not to do it.

         The consensus of the meeting was that the whole heavy, top down, managerially driven, non-adaptable model was wrong. Rather we need, said Peter Greengross from the Learning Clinic, an approach that is simple, user friendly to clinicians, responsive, bottom up, and doesn’t require dramatic change in the way people work.

Real benefits in raising quality and improving productivity do, however, depend on people working in different ways and technology substituting for people, And the human change is the hardest part. Mark Ebbens from GE Health illustrated the point by describing the state of the art technology he has to measure his fitness, which even “sends me emails telling me how unfit I am” but which is useless if he doesn’t change.

But, asked somebody in the audience, what about Epic, the electronic records system used by Kaiser in the US? Isn’t it wonderful? Yes it may be, answered somebody else in the audience, but it cost Kaiser $4 billion, 10% of its turnover, and 10% of its staff time and almost bankrupted the organisation. What about Vista, the system installed in the Veterans’ Administration in the US, asked somebody else. It’s open source and is being installed in Jordan. Couldn’t the NHS install it? Nobody seemed to know the answer to this, but somebody pointed out that two thirds of big information technology projects failed. There’s no appetite for another grand scheme.

We could all agree that getting information technology to improve healthcare is “difficult and complex,” and there was a sense that much of the time we didn’t quite know what we were talking about. People casually threw around words and phrases like “social media,” “the cloud,” “apps,” “real time data,” telemedicine,” and “bar-coding,” but I couldn’t stop myself thinking that if we were start to explore exactly how these things could deliver value in healthcare the screen would go blank.

The moment when the meeting came most alive was when a young surgeon said: “This is all wonderful and inspiring, but for somebody working everyday in the NHS it sounds like science fiction.” He told us about junior doctors coming to work 45 minutes early because they shared one computer with eight others. In the academic health centre where he works he has three passwords for three systems on one of which he can see CT scans and on another the reports–but there is no system where he can see them together.

“What can the government do?” asked somebody charged with advising the government. Set standards for interoperability, agreed all the experts. While the current strategy after the horror of Connecting for Health is to let a “thousand flowers bloom” and “the market lead, there seemed to be agreement that it would not be good to end up with dozens of systems that couldn’t speak to each other.

Who, asked Carter plaintively, is charged with ensuring integration across the whole health system? He worried that the NHS was “about to drop the ball” and wanted a answer. He didn’t get an answer until almost the last word of the meeting when he was told “Probably the GPs, but most of them won’t do much unless we pay them to do it.”

Will we still in five years be debating whether information technology can improve healthcare? I fear so.

This blog has is being posted on three sites—those of the Health Services Journal, BMJ, and Patients Know Best.

Competing interest: I am the chair of Patients Know Best, a start up that uses information technology to enhance clinician patient partnership. I am not paid but have equity, and, although I sound cynical in this blog, I’m confident that Patients Know Best is delivering benefits and can do so on a larger scale.

Over the next couple of months, the matched funding component is allowing us to raise money from social investors, scaling up the company while keeping our focus on patients. The new investors join our existing world class investors, including Esther Dyson (one of the top health IT angel investors in the world), Channel 4 (one of the UK’s largest TV stations) and Seedcamp (Europe’s top seed fund).

• Jo Hill
• Guardian Professional, Tuesday 25 October 2011 11.10 BST
• Article history

Big Venture Challenge winner Mohammad Al-Ubaydli Photograph: Big Venture Challenge

In the twelfth of a series of articles on the Big Venture Challenge winners, we introduce today Mohammad Al-Ubaydli founder of Patients Know Best.

Big Venture Challenge is a national programme, run by UnLtd and supported by the Big Lottery Fund, to find 25 of the most ambitious social entrepreneurs in England. The 25 winners all want investment so that their enterprises can deliver social impact on a significant scale. They will each receive a unique package of financial and non-financial support to help them achieve their goals. Meet winner No 12:

 

Mohammad Al-Ubaydli – Patients Know Best

 

Who are they?

Mohammad founded Patients Know Best as a patient with a rare disease because he saw the benefits of putting patients in control. He trained as a physician at the University of Cambridge, worked as a staff scientist at the National Institutes of Health, and was a management consultant to US hospitals at The Advisory Board Company.

 

What do they do?

Patients Know Best (PKB) created the world’s first patient-controlled medical records system. It is used by clinicians at Great Ormond Street Hospital, UCL Hospital, St Mark’s Hospital, Torbay Hospital and across the UK. It is also powering medical research funded by pharmaceutical companies like Novartis. By using the software, the NHS reduces costs, raises quality and puts patients in control of their health.

 

Why were they selected?

The judges and UnLtd were impressed by Mohammad’s passion, knowledge and commitment. They were also excited by the venture’s potential impact, which could be very significant. It is a pioneering initiative, and the support from Big Venture Challenge could help build its profile.

Brad and Mathew contacted me over the summer inviting me to become a mentor. I spoke to them, liked them, and agreed to join. They then gave me a login as a mentor and I was amazed at the tool they had built for identifying, targeting and recruiting mentors. I could see that they had targeted me a while back and eventually gotten an introduction to me through a friend. They were quite systematic, and they had built a great network of mentors which I am quite proud to join.

I then asked about investing, because I had been looking for a healthcare-focused seed fund. Winning Seedcamp back in 2009 was amazing, and we got so much support from being part of Europe’s top seed fund. The one thing I wished I had had was health care mentors, as Seedcamp does not focus on any one industry. (It is quite an education learning with founders from so many different sectors.) And the one thing I knew when founding Patients Know Best was how much health care needed start-ups to deliver innovation to patients and professionals.

Interviewing Brad and Mathew’s references was fun. There were lots of people who thought these two were amazing people, but what struck me was how – even when extremely busy with their own start-ups – each of them spent time mentoring others. This is really the spirit on which Blueprint is built.

Finally, I was pleased that they had set up the seed fund in New York City. A lot of press attention is focused on Silicon Valley, a truly wonderful place for web 2.0 start-ups, and a completely irrelevant one for health care. London, Boston, the Midwest, and NYC are where health care innovators cluster, and where their innovations are adopted into medical practice for global distribution. Brad and Mathew had started in a great location and had access to a great pool of entrepreneurs.

So, if you are thinking of creating a health care start-up, I highly recommend you speak to them. And of course, as a mentor and investor, I would be delighted to do my part and speak to you as well. Drop me a line on mohammad@patientsknowbest.com and I look forward to learning about your innovations.

About Blueprint Health

A charter member of the TechStars Network, Blueprint Health is a mentorship-driven startup accelerator based in NYC that helps first-time and experienced entrepreneurs seeking to build innovative companies at the intersection of health and technology. We provide teams with $20,000, office space and mentorship for 3 months. The program begins January 9 and we are now accepting applications. If you are interested in getting involved or applying go to www.blueprinthealth.org.

A young lady, coming up to her 18th birthday, was able to do the transfer by granting her new specialist team access to her old pediatric medical records. The two hospitals – Great Ormond Street Hospital and St Mark’s Hospital – are both in London, but from completely different NHS Trusts. Rather than having to wait for integration between the two hospitals’ computers systems – something that may never come given the failure of the National Program for IT – the transfer of data could happen instantly because the patient is in control.

This story is particularly meaningful to me because I remember my own transfer to adult care as an 18-year old. I was a sulky teenager, especially about my illness. Moving from a pediatric ward to an adult one full of much older and much sicker strangers was stressful despite the best attempts of the wonderful doctors and nurses looking after me. I hope that this Great Ormond Street Hospital patient and others have an easier time thanks to controlling their records.

There are two advantages to using PKB for research. First, our privacy controls make it technically and ethically easy to collect data from patients for research, without giving away the identity of the patients. The protection means that patients are happy taking part in research trials. This in turn makes it faster to get ethics approval.

Second, we can capture more data more accurately than in the normal methods of traditional research trials. This is because patients use PKB to get care from their clinicians. So the data analyzed are actual care data, rather than a parallel, research-only data set. The data used are thus more comprehensive and more accurate than with other methods.

If you are an academic researcher, or work at a pharmaceutical company, contact the PKB team so we can help with your research efforts.

Novartis trials Patients Know Best

Pharmaceutical firm Novartis is to begin a post-market trial using the online patient-controlled personal health records service supplied by Patients Know Best.

Post-market trials are conducted for drugs that have passed initial toxicity and effectiveness tests and received some regulatory approval. They are intended to gather additional information about safety and efficicy and optimal use.

The trial is a significant development for Patients Know Best, which is already in use at several NHS trusts, including Great Ormond Street, University College London and South Devon.

The Novartis-sponsored trial will cover patients living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in five practices linked to a London hospital.

Patients will use the Patients Know Best personal health record to record details of their condition, their treatment and how they feel, which will be analysed for context and meaning.

Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, chief executive and founder of Patients Know Best, told eHealth Insider that data recorded by patients will be analysed using newly incorporated congnitive analysis software. “This will enable us to extract the story the patient is telling us.”

He said that, typically, patients participating in post market trials have little incentive to maintain what they see as a stand-alone trial record, which they tend to see as abstracted from their care.

But he argued that the multi-participant set-up of the Patients Know Best record made it particularly well suited for patients with complex and long-term conditions requiring treatment by extended teams of professionals.

“It is viewed and maintained by the patient’s clinicians as well as the individual. This means they have greater confidence in it and are more likely to use it and keep it up to date.”

He said the methodology of the trial was not specific to Novartis treatments but could be applied to tracking the experience of patients receiving a range of drugs already out in the market.

“We’re trying to find out what it is like receiving these drugs and what it is like managing their COPD.” The trial is due to run until April 2012.

Patients Know Best is currently shortlisted for the Department of Health’s Apps and Mapscompetition.

Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli will be speaking at the EHI Live 2011 conference and exhibition at the NEC in Birmingham on 7-8 November. Registration is open now.

It is with great pleasure that we sponsor Women in the City’s Women of Achievement Award. This year the award has a new Medical category, so it is an honour to be their first sponsor. Nazzarena Arman interviewed Gwen Rhys, founder of the awards, so she could you hear her tell the story of the awards.

The full transcript is after the jump. And of course, if you are considering a career with Patients Know Best, we would love to hear from you.

Nazzarena Arman: Welcome to ‘Patients Know Best’ podcast! My name is Nazzarena, and I am here speaking to Gwen Rhys, Founder of the Women in the City Award. Welcome Gwen!

Gwen Rhys:           Good morning, Nazzarena!

Nazzarena Arman: Good morning to you, Gwen! Tell me about yourself briefly.

Gwen Rhys:           Oh my goodness! Briefly is a bit difficult because I have been around for very long time now. But I am a serial entrepreneur and I have set up many businesses.

As a small child I used to play running a business. Other girls might have played with dolls, or perhaps appropriate for ‘Patients Know Best’, maybe being nurses, but I imagined that I was always going to run a business.

So I set up my first business in my mid-20s, which I then sold and I spent ten years doing a whole variety of work around the UK.

Again, in mid-1990s I set up another business and in 2003 launched the Women in the City.

Nazzarena Arman: Wonderful! Mohammad tells me that you have a very interesting story about the award. How did you get started on that?

Gwen Rhys:           Well, I got started when I held a lunch in November 2003 when I brought together 200 women who were working in the city; they were mostly bankers, lawyers, insurance people, accountants, that kind of thing. That was my idea not to bring together 200; my idea was maybe to have about 50. I simply sent an invitation to women who I knew. I said if I organized an event like this, would you like to come, would you bring some friends?

So it was a great occasion when three months later there were all of us in a room, such energy and a great event, a great event.

And by the end of 2006, I had organized four highly successful lunches. Women in the City was beginning to have a strong presence and influence within the city. The event was very much one of the city’s signature events and people wanted, I think, a little bit more, and to be frank, I was a bit bored. I knew I could organize a great lunch; I wanted to do something as well.

So to bring an added dimension into the whole thing, I had a conversation with Professor Susan Vinnicombe, and she is the Director of the Centre for Women’s Leadership at Cranfield School of Management.

Susan’s team in fact published the annual FTSE Female 100, which looks at the number of women who are reaching senior roles within our major UK companies.

Sadly, the numbers over the years are not increasing. Sue and her team thought that this was due in part, not fully, but in part to the fact that many senior women who did get there, pulled up the door bridge and they kind of said to other women, hey, I am here, but you are not going to get here. I am the queen of the castle now.

So Susan and I felt that having an award which specifically recognized the extent to which senior and partner level women were actively supporting the progress of other women in their organizations and the wide business world would be something unique and different.

Nazzarena Arman: I understand. This is wonderful! Thank you. Tell us about the medicine category. I understand this is the first year this category is part of the Women in the City Award.

Gwen Rhys:           Yes, it is. Up until now we have had categories that are very much focused, as I say, on the typical professions within the city. For the last eight years I have been an informal mentor to a medical student who is now in his second year as a hospital doctor. It was through him that I met Claire Lemer and Emma Stanton of Diagnosis.

And in a conversation with them, they thought the awards were an interesting concept. They in turn put me in touch with Clarissa Fabre, who is President of the Medical Women’s Federation. She was just so enthusiastic about the whole concept and she has two grownup daughters, both of whom are doctors, and so she really understood what it was that we were trying to achieve.

So together we said, well, this is a great category, we will open it to qualified doctors who are working within both the NHS and private practice; they can be working in hospitals, general practice, healthcare, and really any allied health professions.

(00:04:55)

The way we set up our awards is that each award has an endorser. So the Medical Women’s Federation endorses the award. And the role of the endorser is to help promote the awards to membership, and also to put together the judging category panel, because for our awards nominating is simple, filling in the application form is easy, but our judging is vigorous.

So when women win one of our category awards, they really know that they are special, truly, truly special. So that’s basically what that category is all about.

Nazzarena Arman: I understand. That’s wonderful! Thank you. What will ‘Patients Know Best’ do as sponsors for the category then?

Gwen Rhys:           Well, of course the great thing about sponsors is that they are making a commitment to working with Women in the City. So our sponsors are really important people to us. We couldn’t run the awards program without having our sponsors. So I was really delighted when ‘Patients Know Best’ agreed to sponsor this category.

In fact, I heard Mohammad speak about the software that you have developed at Diagnosis Salon, and as a layperson I just thought that the product was amazing, certainly something that I would like to use particularly if I had a long-term chronic illness that needs specialized care.

The other really important thing that all our award sponsors are committed to themselves in their organizations is supporting the progress of women. And on meeting Mohammad I learned, not only more about the product, but really importantly, more about the culture of ‘Patients Know Best’, and one that supports highly flexible working practices, and for men as well as women actually. That helps them to mange their personal career development alongside their other passions and interests.

For me, to use business speak, that was such a great brand alliance and I was thrilled.

So I think as sponsors, obviously Mohammad will sit on the category judging panel and have an influence himself as to who wins the medical category.

I hope too that ‘Patients Know Best’ will encourage its clients to nominate senior level women based in London’s business hubs, who in addition to fulfilling a very demanding role are actively encouraging the progress of women and ensuring that there is sufficient talent coming through in future years.

Nazzarena Arman: That’s wonderful! Thank you Gwen for speaking to us today.

Gwen Rhys:           My pleasure!

Nazzarena Arman: This is the end of our interview with Gwen Rhys, Founder of the Women in the City Award. Thank you very much for listening to ‘Patients Know Best’ podcast.

NHS South Devon had been using Skype for online consultations for a while. Like so many of our customers, they are early adopters of using new technology to improve patient care. When they signed up we integrated Skype video calls so that it would fit into clinical workflow. The lack of integration is what drove so many early criticisms of Sir Bruce’s recommendation of Skype, but with the integration clinicians can comply with their legal requirements for record storage while patients get high quality care without needing to travel.

NHS South Devon patients can register to use PKB with their clinical teams through our customers page:

Skype service expands in south Devon

Clinicians in south Devon are using Skype to hold consultations with patients from their own homes using patient-controlled record system supplier Patients Know Best.

Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, founder of Patients Know Best, told EHI Primary Care that the project had been running for a couple of months in response to demand from clinicians working for South Devon Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.

He added: “It started with speech and language therapy and now lots of other specialists are asking for it and clinicians are using it for pre-operative assessment and also for follow-up appointments.”

Use of the Skype software application for doctor-patient consultations was the subject of debate recently, after NHS medical director Sir Bruce Keogh said he wanted to give doctors’ incentives to carry out online consultations.

Dr Al-Ubaydli said clinicians in south Devon fix a time with the patient for a consultation using Skype and the call is initiated by the clinician.

After the consultation has ended, both the clinician and the patient document what happened using the Patients Know Best online record.

Clinicians can print the entry for their own records. Patients Know Best is working on integration with hospital electronic record systems, where they are in use.

Dr Al-Ubaydli added: “You need to put some thought into how it can be integrated into clinicians’ workflow but if you get it right it can be very powerful for clinical teams.”

In a video blog entry on the Patients Knows Best website, Gary Hotine, health informatics services director for South Devon Health Informatics Service, said it had approached Patients Know Best about using “the industry de facto standard of Skype” after demand from clinicians for video conferencing.

He added: “We had tried a few video conferencing environments previously and they’d all failed for the same reasons.

“These were that – for the patients who have to install the software and get it working on their own computers – it wasn’t quite good or easy enough and we encountered a number of technical problems.”

Hotine said Patients Know Best was also developing integration which would allow the trust to monitor how often clinicians were using the functionality.

He added: “If this is as successful as I think it will be, we’ll need to charge our commissioners for that and evidence how much of that we are doing.”

Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli will be speaking at the EHI Live 2011 conference and exhibition at the NEC in Birmingham from 7-8 November. Registration for the show is open now.