Patient Knows Best

Written By Paul Campion

Patients Know Best (PKB)

⁠Patients Know Best is a UK digital Personal Health Record (PHR) platform used by a number of NHS organisations. Its purpose is to give the patient direct access to health information that would otherwise sit in separate GP, hospital and other healthcare systems.  

It is not the NHS App itself. Rather, PKB can be integrated into the NHS App, so that when a patient selects certain hospital-record functions in the NHS App, the information may actually be provided through PKB.  

What can a patient do with it?

Depending upon what their local NHS organisations have connected to PKB, a patient may be able to:

  • see hospital appointments and appointment letters

  • see blood and other laboratory results

  • see radiology reports

  • access discharge summaries, clinical letters and care plans

  • record their own symptoms, measurements and health information

  • connect data from monitoring/wearable devices

  • securely message healthcare professionals

  • choose to share parts of their record with clinicians, carers or family members.  

An important qualification is that PKB doesn’t automatically contain the patient’s complete NHS record. What appears depends on which NHS Trusts, GP practices and other providers participate and what information they choose to send into PKB.  

Paul Campion
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