London’s King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has chosen cloud communications software and solutions provider IMImobile to help it advance its ‘digital by default’ strategy and support its recovery from the pandemic.
The company says the contract will run until 2025, with the hospital implementing its patient portal and eClinic video consultation platform, alongside eight additional solutions from the company’s patient engagement platform.
In the early stages of the pandemic, healthcare was one of the few areas of IMImobile’s business that was adversely affected, with revenue declining whilst other sectors, such as Banking and Mobile operators, saw growing demand.
In the latest quarter, however, the Healthcare side of the business recovered significantly, as healthcare providers such as King’s College begin to reset and reimagine how they deliver care.
King’s will use the patient portal to reduce the administrative pressure on staff by automatically sending digital letters and enabling patients to cancel and rebook appointments online; and the eClinic will reduce the number of patients attending appointments in-person.
In addition, the trust will make use of instant patient messaging; virtual assistants to respond to patient enquiries; and digital remote monitoring across care pathways.
As well as enabling remote consultations and some monitoring, these tools give patients greater control over their own care, something that we’ve seen an increased appetite for during the pandemic.
Kenny Bloxham, managing director of IMImobile’s healthcare division, said:
“We’re delighted to have agreed a five-year partnership with King’s, and we’re looking forward to supporting them in their recovery phase and helping them to advance their ‘digital by default’ IT strategy.
“Even before the pandemic, we were beginning to see an increased appetite for patients wanting to take greater control of their own care; our technology will allow them to do just that, while also reducing the burden of heavy administrative workloads and enabling remote engagement between staff and patients.”
Jonathan Lofthouse, Web site Chief Govt for the Princess Royal College Hospital added:
“At King’s, it has all the time been our agenda to manoeuvre to a ‘digital by default place’, which is why we have been eager to place digital know-how on the forefront of our restoration and reset programmes.
“We firmly imagine our richly various affected person inhabitants deserves the perfect in healthcare, and to ship this we regularly must reimagine what’s gone earlier than. Utilizing new communication platforms will support affected person self-management, enhance the velocity, high quality and accessibility of data, improve the standard of our medical companies, and assist us to ship in opposition to the long run expectation of our sufferers and clinicians. I’m actually very enthusiastic about this programme of labor.”
