You can now schedule and keep track of your medical appointments on your PKB account. Click on Diary then Calendar.
We are really excited about this feature, it will help in lots of ways, especially as we add to it in the coming months.
First, patients and carers can keep track of health care appointments as part of the medical records. Because these appointments are also visible to your clinicians, they can schedule appointments at more suitable times for you. For example, hospital staff can schedule your clinic appointment to be on the same day as your radiology appointment, rather than booking you for consecutive days.
Second, PKB will send you reminders about upcoming appointments. We will start with email reminders to you and your carers, and later in the year you can also receive SMS reminders. We know that appointment reminders reduce missed appointments, which saves money for health care providers and improves care for patients.
Finally, several hospitals are also sending all their appointments automatically into PKB using our HL7 API. Unlike email and SMS, PKB is secure, so we can store all your appointment information, including the name of the clinical team, maps of how to get to your appointment and medical information about what will happen in the appointment. Therefore, using PKB, the hospital can switch to digital messaging and stop sending out paper letters. This delivers large cost savings for hospitals whilst adding convenience for patients.
Speaking of convenience, later in the year you will be able to synchronise your PKB calendar with your smartphone and Outlook calendars. Like I said, we’re really excited about this feature.