Maudsley builds PHR on HealthVault

Maudsley Hospital

South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust is to develop an online personal health record to encourage clinicians and patients to share information, based on the Microsoft HealthVault platform.

The mental health trust, which provides treatment to a population of 1.1m people in south London, plans to develop a web portal that uses HealthVault to give patients access to health records and new applications to help them manage their condition.

The portal will interface with the trust’s own Electronic Patient Journey System, which was developed with Strand Technology, which has become an approved HealthVault partner for the project.

It will also be accessible to local GPs using EMIS systems. The trust has stressed that the developers will work closely with its clinical and information governance teams to make sure that information is secure and that it can only be shared with the explicit consent of the patient.

Get Real Consulting, a US developer specialising in HealthVault applications, will develop new patient tools, including a mood diary and patient reported outcome measures, again working with clinicians and service users.

Mike Denis, director of information strategy at the trust, told eHealth Insider it had not just wanted to give patients access to records, but to give them more control over their health and treatment options.

“One of the things that we are keen to demonstrate is that we are not just giving people access to EMIS Web, or whatever,” he said.

“We are talking about an individual personal health record owned by the patient that creates a new environment for them in which they can develop a new dialogue with the clinician they are working with.”

Denis said the trust looked at a number of PHR platforms, including the NHS’ HealthSpace portal in the UK and Kaiser Permanente’s personal health record in the US.

He said it had gone with Microsoft because it “got it; it shared the vision of what we wanted to do” and because it “supported the connected health model we wanted to introduce.”

“We looked at the Kaiser Permanente model and that was very much about [the records] belonging to [Kaiser] and patients having to leave [their records] behind them if they left [Kaiser and its family of providers],” he said.

“That is not what we wanted. We wanted patients to be able to share information with other providers in their care, for example their GP practices.”

South London and Maudsley is part of King’s Health Partners academic health sciences centre and prides itself on developing new mental health services.

Denis said he saw the PHR development – which is provisionally called MySLAM, although this is likely to change – as part of this tradition.

“Our experience of giving people care plans is that when patients are surveyed they say they did not get one,” he said. “We think that is because people do not recognise it or think it is useful.

“We want patients to have more information about their condition and the treatment options open to them, so they can play a role in developing their own care plan, and we think that will lead to improved health outcomes.”

The trust hopes to develop the portal within the next four months, and to have three or four GP practices signed up a launch. Eventually, it hopes to involve other local GP practices and its two acute hospitals, Guy’s and King’s.

Although the costs of the project have not been released, Denis said that “compared with what we have spent on an electronic patient record and a research system, these are very low costs.”

John Gobron, UK director at Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group, said in a statement that the project was “a great example of taking advantage of the benefits of technology within healthcare.”

"It is fantastic to work with a trust that is bold enough to challenge, change and revolutionise ways of working in order to empower patients and provide better care," he added.