Sexual health charity goes live with new information system

A not-for-profit charity in Guernsey has gone live with a new information system for sexual health services from Inform Health.

Choices, the main provider of contraceptive and sexual health services in Guernsey, went live with this new system in December 2021 and it was scoped, customised and tested within eight weeks.

When the charity retired its incumbent IT contract in April 2021, it took the opportunity to have one built around its own requirements. It wanted to ensure staff had quick access to up-to-date patient data; the ability to enhance patient experience; and a mechanism that could automate and streamline processes such as results notification and reporting.

It was also important that the new system was scalable, with scope to provide enhance autonomy to patients, and could help to reduce pressure on services through its functionality.

Fiona Hardy, Choices’ service manager said: “The great thing about our Inform system is the flexibility of configuration. Through working closely with the project team at Inform, albeit entirely remotely due to the pandemic, we’ve created something that not only serves our present needs but, due to the shared Inform framework, enables us to easily extend our offering to patients as and when our service evolves.

“This implementation represents the start of a completely new way of delivering sexual health and contraception services to Guernsey’s population; one where technology, process automation and access to quality data facilitates a more holistic approach to patient care, alleviates administrative burden on staff to enable us to optimise service delivery and provides us with the information we need to assess performance and target provision.”

Choices new system is able to manage online booking, postal STI testing kits and self check-in kiosks at clinics making it highly functional and also freeing up staff to spend more time with patients. The risks of human error have also been minimised and the automation of manual tasks – such as sending text messages to notify patients of results – will improve efficiency for the charity.

Inform Health was – for the first time – asked to integrate its health information system with a separate billing platform.

Sue Bunn, Inform Health’s commercial director, added: “Keeping patients at the heart of this project has been second nature, as all parties share the core value of championing patient safety and experience above all else. With this shared vision and through exceptional partnership working we’ve succeeded in developing, testing and implementing a bespoke system that integrates seamlessly with Total Solutions Group, ‘Medibooks’ billing platform, in record time.”

Choices isn’t the only organisation to enhance their sexual health services through technology from Inform Health. At the start of the year Cumbria Sexual Health Service extended its use of the Inform Health platform to offer patients online booking and postal self-testing kits. In July of this year Solent NHS Trust went live with a personal health record system from Inform Health to facilitate an integrated approach to remote delivery of sexual health services.