Patient entered online information to support video outpatient consultations

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The Covid-19 crisis has led to the rapid implementation of outpatient appointments being conducted remotely by video or telephone. However, the doctor or nurse has limited information about the patient, the problem they have and their background medical history. If this is entered online by the person before the consultation, the remote consultation will be more efficient and more likely to avoid a subsequent face to face appointment.Ultramed has developed a digital health platform delivering MyPreOp which is a part of the NHS Innovation Accelerator and is supported by NHS England for widespread adoption in the NHS. The vision is to develop the digital health platform to deliver online pre-appointment programs for a range of clinical specialties.The key objective is to rapidly build and deploy these outpatient facing programs. It was anticipated this would take 2 years to deliver. However, the Covid-19 crisis and the need to deliver non face to face outpatient appointments means that there is an urgent need to bring forward the timeline. The Innovation Funding will allow this to happen.A range of outpatient programs will be developed built on the existing digital health platform. This requires the clinical questions to be written and software code to be developed to deploy each program. A document upload functionality will be developed and deployed that will allow patients to upload documents or photos to share with the hospital consultant who is conducting the remote outpatient appointment. The programs will be available through the NHS patient login.This is innovative in putting the patient in control of their information which they choose to share with their healthcare provider before their outpatient appointment. The person has time to consider carefully the questions they are asked and input their answers. They also have the opportunity to enter questions that they would like to be answered by the doctor or nurse as part of the outpatient appointment.This is the basis of a Personal Health Record and Ultramed owns the trademark MyPHR. This approach has not previously been adopted in the outpatient setting to decrease the number of face to face appointments. It aligns with the NHS Long Term Plan to reduce face to face appointments by 1/3rd. This was the reason this suite of programs was going to be developed but the Covid-19 crisis has made this urgent.An extension to the original project will allow a further 4 outpatient facing products to be developed using the same methodology. This will increase the range of specialties covered by the MyOPD suite of programs. In addition, new software capability will be developed that will allow the reviewing/managing clinician to action tasks that will help them optimise the pre-appointment management of the patient.