A Customer First initiative has helped a technical team at Ninewells Hospital to open the door to better medical advice for diabetes patients throughout Scotland.
As the nation’s 230,000 people with diabetes is expected to double in number within the next 10 to 15 years, the ‘My Diabetes My Way’ website is playing a vital role in empowering patients to manage their own condition.
For some years, a technical team at Dundee’s Ninewells Hospital has been pioneering an online service for diabetes patients throughout Scotland. When it was decided to make the ‘My Diabetes My Way’ site fully interactive, it was vital to ensure that patient records were completely secure.
Scott Cunningham, the technical consultant for the website, explains: “We’ve been providing online advice and medical information for people with diabetes for 10 or 11 years. We wanted to make this new, national site more interactive, but there was an obvious problem in ensuring security for the personal information held on each patient’s file.
“However, the Citizen's Account is totally secure, so we were able to use that as the platform for the My Diabetes My Way website – it was one of the key building blocks of our enhanced service and saved our small team a great deal of time. It’s quite normal for worried patients to find that they don’t remember what their consultant, GP, or practice nurse said at their latest check-up, but now they can remind themselves by going online at home to see the notes from their health care professional.”
Originally developed by Customer First as a method for putting the services of all 32 Scottish councils online, the Citizen's Account is now being adapted for wider use – including in the NHS.
It is anticipated that, as patients become more confident in managing their own condition, the website will lead to fewer patient appointments, thus saving the NHS time and money. Similar sites are being considered to cover other long-term medical conditions, such as cancer or asthma.
What Products?
The technical team at My Diabetes My Way adapted and customized the following Customer First tool:
Citizen's Account/Citizen's Portal – a single online portal through which citizens can access a wide range of public services, including personal health details, prescriptions and hospital appointments. The Citizen's Account provides secure authentication of each user’s identity.
Number Crunching
£3.3 billion – targeted annual government savings on technology infrastructure
26p – the average cost of a public sector internet transaction
£30 million – potential annual savings for Scottish local government through improved delivery of online and telephone services
‘‘It was one of the key building blocks of our enhanced service and saved our small team a great deal of time."
Customer First is a £34.5m Scottish Government-backed programme to deliver more convenient and responsive public services, encourage online access to services and ensure that at least 75% of core service requests can be handled at first point of contact. It has been developed in partnership with local government and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE), under the auspices of the Improvement Service.
