East Surrey Hospital achieves service redesign through its PHR

The service looks after around 4,000 patients. Stretched staff resources had led to long waiting times for outpatients and adverse outcomes, for example in emergency admissions. 

The PHR has been championed by ESH’s IBD service lead Dr Azhar Ansari. The service has achieved clear benefits, with no reduction of clinical safety, to: 

• lower costs significantly

• use limited staff resources better

• improve patient experience   

The PHR system now allows the IBD service to provide care to more patients that need close monitoring.  

Patients use the PHR to record their symptoms and communicate with the IBD team, more often and remotely.

The PHR enabled the ESH IBD service to introduce a new drug treatment, which costs less but needs more patient monitoring.  

The PHR system allows patients to manage their use of the new treatment remotely.

The new treatment costs just £200 per patient per year and remote monitoring reduces side effects. 

This in turn: 

• reduces the need for clinical intervention and escalation to more expensive therapies, which cost on average £12,500 per patient per year

• leads to a 90% reduction in admissions and 80% reduction in operations

• reduces the wait to access specialist care at the time of a flare-up, from 6 weeks to 1 week

• saves patients travel time and costs, as they don’t need time off work to attend appointments

• helps patients to feel in control 

The new treatment, supported by PHR use, leads to potential savings of around £1.5 million a year on operations alone.

These details have come from a Royal College of Physicians (RCP) case study.  

It includes greater details on further benefits, funding, patient outcomes and lessons learned. 

• Visit ‘Outpatients: the future – adding value through sustainability’ on the RCP website 

• Scroll to the ‘Downloads’ section near the bottom of the page 

• Visit page 11 of ‘Outpatients - The future – Case studies’