NHS rolls out speciality online services now

The roll out of NHS Highland Patient Hub continues with neurology, dermatology, gastroenterology, gynaecology, ophthalmology, ear nose and throat (ENT) and rheumatology already live on the system and more specialities expected to go live in 2022.

Patient Hub has been introduced to assist with organisation for patient service administration. It is a secure online patient portal providing patients with personal information relating to their care at the click of a button. Once fully operational it will allow access to information related to hospital appointments via smart phone, tablet or computer.

A NHS Highland spokesperson said: "The system allows access to information relating to new appointments. By new we mean patients who have been referred but are waiting for their first appointment with the service."

Patients awaiting a new outpatient appointment at an NHS Highland hospital will automatically receive a text and/or email asking them to confirm whether they still require the appointment now or at a future date, or not at all. Patients will only be contacted when they have been waiting for a specified number of weeks – this will be different for every speciality.

The text/email will be from NHS-NoReply and patients are asked to follow the instructions contained in the message.

Katherine Sutton, chief officer for acute services, said: “Our patients are responding well with 71 per cent feeding back their choices to us directly via the system. We look forward to exploring other digital technologies to improve our patient’s experiences.”

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