Radboud University Medical Centre (UMC) – a world-renowned academic hospital in the Netherlands – is using Patients Know Best (PKB) to provide a virtual outpatient clinic environment for internal medicine and dermatology patients. At the moment a trial, Radboud UMC hopes to extend the service to more patient groups over time.
The patients involved in the initiative are given a variety of different electronic health management apps to monitor their health.
Guided by a specially trained ehealth nurse, patients are offered tools such as Medapp to monitor their medications, an app called Q1.6 to measure their daily pain scores and a Withings blood pressure monitor and weightscale – for all patients.
The data from these apps are combined via the patient’s PKB portal and from there, the patient can clearly see how their conditions are progressing and changing over time – meaning they can take action as a result.
Patients and clinicians can cross reference the tracking data provided from the different apps to enable them to spot patterns in their health and better understand how lifestyle choices might be impacting pain management.
Using Patients Know Best, the patient will be able to share their blood test results with other doctors who need to see them – this means they don’t need to attend multiple consultations or give multiple blood samples.
Using PKB in a virtual outpatient clinic environment also enables Radboud UMC patients to have more direct access to the clinicians treating them – something which gives the patients peace of mind without additional work for clinical teams as answers do not need to be immediate.
As the clinical team at Radboud UMC treats patients from across the Netherlands, using their PKB-powered virtual clinic means patients no longer need to spend hours travelling to attend routine check ups – if they don’t wish to. Doctors offer patients virtual consultations conducted via Facetalk a Skype-like video call messenger – something that saves Radboud’s clinical staff time too.