NHS PHP Booking App
NHS PHP Healthcare
With mental health and stress issues growing among doctors and trainees in the UK, The NHS Practitioner Health Programme (PHP) has been delivering care to doctors for a number of years through its London office. Under the plan, NHS PHP would expand to offer care to GPs and trainees in England suffering from mental health and addiction issues. This care and support would include face-to-face services providing general psychiatric assessment and treatment as well as ongoing support for addiction-related health problems.
The program would focus on providing early intervention so doctors and dentists can continue providing safe and valued care to their patients.
Users in the first 2 weeks
Clinicians and therapists at rollout
Development weeks
Potential users
Goals
- Provide a consistent solution with speed of delivery and innovation.
- Effectively manage confidentiality to all users.
- Serve the patient through any mobile devices.
- Create a great user experience.
Solution
As part of the new service, the NHS PHP needed to build a mobile app and an online patient booking system that provided anonymity to patients. And the app had to be ready in less than two months to meet the go-live date in January 2017.
The main benefits in selecting OutSystems focused around speed of delivery, speed of change, innovation and a great user experience. A proof of concept on the potential mobile application was completed during the procurement phase in under one week.Here’s how it works: Medical professionals need to be assessed to determine the nature and treatment they need to receive.
Once assessed, the individual is assigned a number of appointments and given a URL to the mobile app. The app shows a list of all practitioners in the vicinity of the medical professional seeking support. The user also has the ability to click through icons to see a photograph and biography of the medical professional.
Results
The online patient booking system is used by three different users: the back office administrators of the PHP service, those who provide the treatment, and the NHS professionals that require help. There are four back office staff who will administer the system and, initially, 90 clinicians and therapists who have made their time available via the app.
Thanks to OutSystems and Truewind, the app can be deployed to any device and healthcare professionals can book their consultations from any device, whether that is iOS, Android smartphones or a tablet. “If we hadn’t digitised this service, we would have needed to double our administrative staff from 4 to 8. We simply don’t have the space to house that many staff,” Lucy says. “Patients have found the system very intuitive and as a result have required minimal training.”
This is an extremely short period to completely mobilise a national service and make it widely available. If we hadn’t digitised this service, we would have needed to double our administrative staff. Patients have found the system very intuitive and as a result have required minimal training. It really does put the patient at the centre of care. We are the only organisation running a national service like this and it means we can give NHS staff real flexibility with times and locations to suit them.
The NHS Practitioner Health Programme is an award winning, free and confidential NHS service for doctors and dentists with issues relating to a mental or physical health concern or addiction problem, in particular where these might affect their work. The GP Health Service can help with issues relating to a mental health concern, including stress or depression, or an addiction problem, in particular where these might affect work. These two services provide support to over 85,000 doctors across England.
