Last week the government announced a Major Conditions Strategy which sets out their ambitions on improving health care and prevention around the six long-term conditions that account for the majority of ill health in England. Over the next five years, rather than single disease strategies, an integrated approach will be used to target the primary and secondary prevention of cancer, dementia, musculoskeletal disorders, chronic respiratory disease, CVD and mental ill health. This strategy will align with the planning cycle of the new Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) which became statutory in July 2022.
As part of the focus on prevention and early diagnosis the NHS Health Check will continue to play an important role within the strategy, helping to empower people to live healthy lives. In the recent Spring Budget Chancellor Jeremy Hunt confirmed that the NHS Health Check will become digitised in order to ‘identify and prevent more cases of cardiovascular disease’. Instead of a face-to-face meeting, the proposal is to offer patients a digital check that includes an online questionnaire, a kit to take a blood sample at home, and a blood pressure check at the pharmacy or in the GP's waiting room by spring 2024.
The digital approach to implementing prevention programmes, such as the NHS Health Check will be more convenient for many people but will be far less popular with groups with little or very low levels of IT skills and health literacy, meaning a number of at-risk groups will fall through the net of digital inclusion.
This proposed approach may in fact exacerbate health inequalities if it is not carefully implemented to promote uptake in under-served groups. Which is why we think it is extremely important that Primary Care continues to offer the option of face-to-face prevention programmes within the GP practice as well offering support to promote digital inclusion. However, we do see that this can put a strain on many clinicians, and that is where the health kiosk comes into its own...
Cut Clinician time with the EK Health Kiosk:
Let us explain what the EK Health Kiosk is and how it can benefit your practice, carrying out more health checks without straining resources. We know that giving these checks 20 to 30 minutes can be hard on your practice, and since you usually only have 10 minutes with each patient, it's important to make the most of every minute. Our EK Health Kiosks can take care of blood pressure, height, and weight, as well as help patients through the targeted NHS Health Check questions. This means that when your patient sits down in front of you, you'll already have this information, which will cut the time needed for the NHS Health Check.
"The Kiosk is being very helpful with our NHS Health Checks, it has reduced the time our HCS spends with the patients by 15 minutes a patient. Rather than booking out half an hour we now book for 15 minutes and ask the patient to attend 10 minutes before their appoinemtn to use the kioski for all of the questions and readings. We are just about to step it up gradually for height, weight & BPs for all attending patients before they have their appointments"
Patients also can use our kiosk to answer health questions from our library of 18+ Care Pathways and collect vital sign measurements without requiring the assistance of a professional. SNOMED coding is used to seamlessly integrate the results into the patient record. This improves patient flow without sacrificing care while also recording QOF data, reducing clinical time and allowing for more appointments.
How does it work?
The patient logs into the kiosk with their name and date of birth, which are cross-checked against their medical records, to complete questionnaires and assessments that are relevant to them. The results are SNOMED tagged and stored in the patient's medical record (both EMIS and SystmOne), where a clinician can review them. Our customisable questionnaires include Asthma Reviews, Oral Contraceptive Medication Reviews, Diabetes, Hypertension and more!
No clinical intervention
No manual inputting
Automatic integration with EMIS and SystmOne using SNOMED
Data capture for QOF and IFF
Free up face to face appointments
Alert triggers for irregular readings
Pathways can be customised
Release time to care
To find out more about the EK Health Kiosk and the benefits it can bring to your practice, get in touch with us on 01223 812737 or hello@ekinteractive.co.uk, we’d be happy to discuss this with you and arrange a free, no obligation demo.