Croydon Sexual Health to implement Inform Health PHR

Croydon Sexual Health has announce plans to implement Inform Health’s patient facing personal health record (PHR) as part of plans to manage increasing demand.

The PHR is scheduled to go live at Croydon Sexual Health, part of Croydon Health Services, in spring 2025.

It is aimed at empowering patients to self-manage aspects of their sexual health, such as booking appointments and ordering STI testing kits and contraception via an intelligence and tailored triage process.

Jamal Smith-John, operations manager sexual health and HIV at Croydon Health Services NHS Trust, said: “Having our services integrated within one digital platform makes patient care smoother and safer and allows us to allocate the right resources to the right patients to deliver better patient care, while streamlining service delivery.

“PHR will take our digital transformation agenda into its next phase, offering a modern patient portal and updated comms system to further improve communication with our patients on their journey with the service.

“We’re very excited about our new partnership with Inform Health and hope it will bring many benefits.

“Where patients are concerned, we’re hopeful that the PHR will prove user-friendly and enable them to get the relevant information they need quickly and conveniently, including access to appointments, results and advice.

“Similarly, we anticipate the PHR will have a positive impact on staff, both clinical and non-clinical, supporting them to carry out their work more effectively with an intuitive system that allows us to maintain high standards of patient care.”

The record will integrate with lab systems to facilitate automated results notification. Combined, this will enable patients with more straight-forward care needs to benefit from online sexual health provision, while freeing up resource for patients with more complex needs to be seen face-to-face in clinic.

Inform Health is a specialist technology and service provider to the sexual health, HIV and sexual assault referral centre (SARC) sectors.

With more patients presenting with complex needs at Croydon Sexual Health, the PHR will give patients the autonomy to contribute to their own clinical triage, enabling the service to manage increasing demand and ensure appropriate time and resource is allocated to manage each individual patient.

Sue Bunn, commercial director at Inform Health, said: “As the only London-based local authority commissioned service to offer locally managed online screening and e-services, Croydon Sexual Health has a track record for embracing technology to transform efficiencies, quality of care and patient access.

“Our partnership marks the next step in the journey, using technology to offer an improved patient experience.

“Streamlining activity will offer a true 360 view of the patient and support Croydon Sexual Health to respond to increasing patient demand and deliver best practice integrated sexual health and HIV provision.”

Earlier in February 2025, we reported that researchers at the University of Westminster have developed a chatbot for discussing sensitive topics, such as sexual health screenings, which they believe could help reduce health inequalities.