Why

PKB secure messaging is designed to resolve the inefficiencies of traditional communication (phone, email, and paper) by embedding security and workflow management directly into the patient record.

Identity verification: Traditional phone and email inquiries require manual identity checks for every interaction, consuming significant staff time. Because PKB users are pre-verified, clinicians can share information immediately without the administrative burden of repeated ID checks.
Automated Consent: Manually verifying whether a carer or family member has permission to see information is a common problem. PKB’s built-in consent model automatically manages these permissions, ensuring that staff communicate with carers involved in the patient's care.
Sharing information: Unlike ephemeral phone calls or unarchived emails, PKB captures all dialogue within the patient record. This ensures a transparent, permanent audit trail accessible to the entire multi-disciplinary team across different organisations and any carers.
Integrating records: Messages in the PKB record are available to local medical records systems (EMR). This is either through logging into the PKB, single sign-on from clinical records systems into PKB, or API integration, with data from PKB stored in local electronic health records and shared care records systems.
Spreading workload: Shared inboxes often lead to duplicated effort or missed queries. PKB allows team members to assign messages and mark them complete, providing clear visibility on what has been handled and what is pending.
Reduce workload: By providing patients and carers with direct, secure access to their own data and a dedicated channel to discuss it, teams can bypass the repetitive manual tasks associated with traditional patient inquiries.

What

PKB secure messaging is a direct, secure, and asynchronous communication tool that allows patients and healthcare providers to exchange messages and information within a single aggregated record.

Patients can initiate secure messages to their clinical team and include other participants, such as carers or family members, as CC recipients. This ensures that the patient’s entire healthcare team remains informed and aligned.

PKB is designed to manage high-volume clinical inquiries. The key features are:

Team Notifications: When a message is sent, PKB alerts all team members via their standard work email address.
Message Assignment: Professionals can assign specific messages to themselves, providing clear ownership so colleagues know the query is being handled.
Expert Clinical Input: Clinicians can add specialists or senior staff to any messaging thread on an ad-hoc basis for specific advice.
Resolution Management: Once a problem is solved, staff can archive the thread. This closes the interaction and removes it from the active inbox, maintaining a clean workspace for the team.

Unlike fragmented phone calls or personal emails, PKB stores the entire message history within the patient’s record. This ensures that every clinician and carer involved in the patient’s journey has access to a single, transparent version, facilitating total continuity of care.

How

For secure messaging to be effective, it must be adopted as a standardised, business-as-usual tool across the entire organisation.

Every team within the organisation should be configured for messaging. Providing a consistent experience across all departments prevents communication silos and ensures a unified patient journey.
Clearly communicate to both staff and patients that secure messaging is the primary channel for non-urgent inquiries. When messaging is normalised, it becomes a dependable standard rather than an optional extra.
By moving all teams to PKB, patients see the immediate value of the one-time registration process. A single digital front door allows them to coordinate with their entire care network through one record.
Universal adoption creates digital-ready patients. This ensures that the initial investment in staff training pays off quickly, as a high volume of routine administrative tasks is successfully diverted to the more efficient messaging workflow.

PKB Message Button

Clinical and administration teams can replace their generic email addresses and phone numbers with a direct PKB messaging button on their websites. When a patient clicks this button, they are prompted to sign in to their record to message the team securely, establishing PKB as the primary route for receiving and managing all patient enquiries.

The URL for the PKB Message button on your website is below.

https://SERVER.patientsknowbest.com/auth/composeMessageForm.action?tab=messages&subTab=startDiscussion

Make sure to set the right values

SERVER = the subdomain for the country server, e.g., http://ca.patientsknowbest.com Canada / http://eu.patientsknowbest.com for EU / http://my.patientsknowbest.com for the UK
TEAM_ID = the ID for your team, which you can ask your PKB Success PM for

Send Message Button

The HTML code for the PKB secure messaging button is below.

<a href="https://my.patientsknowbest.com/auth/composeMessageForm.action?tab=messages&subTab=startDiscussion" aria-label="Click here to send your team a message" target="_blank">

<img src="https://patientsknowbest.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/PKB-Send-Message.svg" alt="Click here to send your team a message" style="height: 40px; width: 165px;"></img>

</a>

Button options

The image for the Message buttons options are below. Please ask your Success PM for further support on team messaging.

Button 1

Button 2

Button

For Self-referral Pathways

The team will need two buttons on your website with instructions:

Add yourself to the team https://SERVER.patientsknowbest.com/registerPatientStart.action?icode=TEAM_ID

Send a message to the team https://SERVER.patientsknowbest.com/auth/composeMessageForm.action?tab=messages&subTab=startDiscussion

Admin Teams

Start with purely administrative teams, which allows a soft launch that does not affect front-line clinical services. These teams benefit immediately because PKB automates the identity verification required for their high-volume workflows. Three examples include:

Patient Advice and Liaison Services (PALS): Patients can message questions or complaints and grant temporary record access to the PALS team, who can then invite relevant clinicians with first-hand knowledge of the problem, to solve it quickly and transparently. After solving the enquiry, the team can return to having no access to the patient’s record.
Medical Records: Teams can fulfil data requests for patients by registering unregistered patients if they aren't already registered. For patients where that record does not already include the data the patient asked for, the team can manually upload unlimited documents, including scanned PDFs of paper notes, and compressed folders of imaging studies. eliminating the need for manual identity forms, paper scanning, or postage delays.
Central Appointment Administration: Hospitals use a central team to book and change appointments on behalf of clinical departments. They respond to phone calls and text messages. These have no audit trail, individual responders can only work on one patient at a time, and there is no visibility of the allocation of cases between team members. Secure messaging in PKB provides an audit trail, a responder can work with multiple patients simultaneously, and a manager can see who is helping whom. As soon as the team member books the appointment, the appointment notifies PKB and PKB notifies the patient.

For more information on PKB appointment management, click here.

Clinical Teams

After establishing administrative teams, organisations can transition specialty teams by standardising PKB as the primary channel for all non-urgent patient inquiries. To facilitate this, teams can update their website and contact information to replace generic email addresses with a prominent PKB secure messaging link (shown above), clearly stating that PKB messaging is the preferred method while retaining a phone number for those unable to use digital tools.

The workflow can begin with administrative staff managing non-clinical queries and triaging messages. Over time, clinicians can join to resolve clinical questions escalated by their administrative colleagues. This structure ensures that clinicians do not need to be directly contactable by patients; instead, they provide expert support to the front-line staff who manage the patient dialogue.

Each department can design escalation pathways that suit their specific staffing models. For instance, a nursing team might serve as the first line of contact for patients with consultants providing back-end support, or a reception team could handle initial administrative and appointment queries before escalating clinical matters to a second-line nursing team. This tiered approach allows specialists and senior staff to remain involved in patient care through internal escalation without managing a direct patient inbox.

Further Information

Benefits of PKB Secure Messaging