Development Update – September 2021

Welcome to September’s instalment of our upcoming development blog. We have lots of important work to share this month, the highlights are: 

• Notifying patients using the NHS App about new messages in their record
• Making it easier to add symptoms 
• Fixing usability issues in the Library
• Improving the display of measurements 
• Updating our privacy policy
• Moving our customer reports to Google Data Studio

Patients will receive notifications from PKB in the NHS App

This month, we will begin work to send notifications in the NHS App about new messages that patients have received in PKB.  These notifications will apply for all message types, including encounters and consultations. The user will be able to tap into the PKB Events & Messages section to read their message directly from the notification in the NHS App. This will allow users of the NHS App to be notified about new messages without needing to check their emails.  

PKB’s email notifications already work well. 79% of patients receiving documents in PKB click their email notifications to read their letters, with 89% of these patients doing so within 48 hours. This upgrade will make responding to a notification even more convenient for patients.

New ‘Add symptoms’ page

Following a redesign session with patients, we will be updating the layout of the ‘Add symptoms’ page to simplify the process of adding symptoms via the user interface.  We will add a search function for symptoms, and the new ‘Add symptoms’ form will also enable users to add multiple symptoms at once and will no longer require the user to have to scroll through the full list to save their symptoms. We have recently applied a similar update to the Tests and Measurements pages and will do the same for Medicines later this year. 

Library bug fixes

We are improving the usability of the Library section based on feedback we have received from team coordinators and patients. The fixes include: 

• Preserving any changes made to the order of library items via drag and drop by coordinators and ensuring these changes are reflected in the coordinator, patient and professional views of the Library
• Fixing navigation when viewing, editing or deleting Library items so the user is not sent back to the main page when carrying out those actions
• Displaying Library files with quote marks in the names correctly
• Adding a discuss button to the patient’s personal Library 
• Preventing patients or carers deleting Library links that were added to their record by a professional
• Removing redundant URL editing functionality for folders & files in the Library
• Making it possible to upload multiple files at once in the Library.

Measurements daily totals

This month we have changed the way we handle certain measurements so that they are displayed as daily totals on graphs. We will only be doing this for measurements that are intended to be tracked as daily totals, such as alcohol intake per day, step counts or time spent sleeping.  This will make graphs for these measurements easier to interpret. 

PKB is supporting National Fitness Day in the UK on September 22nd.  PKB integrates with many wearable devices and fitness applications, such as Fitbit, Garmin watches and Strava. 

Once a user sets up the integration, measurements will be added to their PKB record automatically on an ongoing basis. They can then share this data with their healthcare professionals or carers.

Updated explanation email for patients when added to a team

We are updating the email sent to patients when they are added to a new team. We are adding a more in depth explanation about which team added them and what being added to a team means.

Menu to change between teams includes organisation name

Professionals and coordinators that are in multiple teams can currently access their different teams by selecting from a dropdown menu located at the top of the screen. Currently, we only show the role and team but we will be adding the organisation name too so that the user can easily identify the team they want to select.

Updated privacy policy and new video guide

This month, we’re updating our privacy policy, the full text can be read in our Manual. When patients are registering, they will also have the opportunity to watch a video about our privacy model. We hope that the video will make our privacy policy easier to understand.

Reporting in Google Data Studio

Over the last few months we have been moving our customer reports from Tableau to Google Data Studio. We are planning to close our customer Tableau accounts at the end of September so that we can focus on improving and expanding our reporting capabilities in Google Data Studio. 

August review

In August, we made a change to the system that was not included in our August blog. This is detailed below:

• Organisation administrators will no longer see the ‘Missing demographics’ page when they log in and will instead be taken to the ‘HL7 review’ screen. This page was removed because it was no longer useful for our users and was slow. For the same reasons we have also removed the ‘Network status’ table from the Organisation networks tab.

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