Patients Know Best

By Figen Gunes

“Patients Know Best (PKB) is for anybody with a body,” says its founder and CEO Mohammad Al-Ubaydli. Whether you have a serious condition or occasional illness, even if you are perfectly well, the system is designed for you.

PKB is an online health management system to integrate health records under one site and it enables doctors to give online consultation.

Al-Ubaydli set up the network after developing a complex illness and found himself travelling long hours between clinics. The system saves time for NHS patients and the name itself encourages patients to take control of their health.

Patients often describe PKB’s web site operating like Facebook, with the patient or the patient’s existing healthcare team able to ‘invite’ individual members of their new care team to be their PKB ‘friends’. Once they accept, friends have full access to their medical history. And Al-Ubaydli is 100% confident that it’s totally secure.

Being the world’s first patient-controlled online medical records system, PKB is enabling the first fully online transition of patients’ medical histories between clinicians through the NHS. 

“The system helps the NHS save money,” says Al-Ubaydli with 15 years of experience in medical software.

“And the UK is the best country to have such network to operate efficiently because we have a national health service which means payer and the provider is the same. They can do long term investments to serve public health,” adds Al-Ubaydli.

After qualifying as a physician at the University of Cambridge, he became an honourary senior research associate at UCL medical school for his research on patient-controlled medical records.

PKB’s latest innovation is to integrate patients’ home weight scales into the NHS network to get a better understanding of a patient’s situation. Skype calls are also integrated into the system and so far the registered patients are finding it helpful when communicating with their doctors.

Two large hospitals in London Great Ormond Street Hospital and St Mark’s Hospital have been working with PKB to help their patients online. 20 hospitals across the UK are already registered as well as four charities and two Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs).

“Doctors commonly believe that they are too busy to also take on the work of online consultations,” says the founder. “But what they discover when using the system is that patients use online consultations to replace unnecessary face-to-face and telephone consultations, and that the increased information sharing reduces work.

The new Clinical Commissioning Groups are very much in favour of this online system, he goes on. “Because it structurally reduces the costs of health care across all settings; it allows patients to self-assess and self-manage; it allows patients the convenience of online consultations; and it puts patients at the centre of care.”

At a time the NHS has been going through the most radical overhaul, Patients Know Best empowers patients amid all these changes in the health service.