June 2025 – Luton Sexual Health (LSH) has become the latest NHS service to adopt Inform Health’s Electronic Patient Record (EPR) and Personal Health Record (PHR) systems, as part of plans to increase patient access and improve service efficiencies.
Now available via LSH’s website, the PHR is empowering patients across Luton to create and access their sexual health record quickly and easily online. Once registered, patients can book and cancel appointments and order condoms to be delivered by post. Phase two of the PHR implementation will offer further benefits – giving patients the option to access their STI test results online, as well as upload images and share documents to support remote appointment delivery.
Since going live at the end of 2024, 2,662 appointments have been made via PHR, which is easing pressure on LSH’s clerical team, while providing patients with added control and convenience.
Jenny Melrose, Operations Lead at LSH comments: “The PHR is already proving popular across our diverse patient population, which demonstrates demand for increased pathways to accessing our services. With many patients now opting to book and amend their appointments online, pressure on our reception team has significantly reduced.”
Offering open access hub and outreach services that provide free, confidential, non-judgemental and inclusive HIV, sexual health and contraception services, LSH also needed an improved EPR system to manage its 16,000+ annual attendances. Implemented alongside the PHR, LSH’s new EPR is already delivering a string of benefits relating to improved visibility over demand, more efficient clinical practice and more robust safeguarding.
Jenny explains: “Moving to Inform Health’s EPR is transforming how we operate for the better. We now have instant visibility over patients – who’s arrived, who’s DNA’ed, who’s currently in consult. This improves our understanding and informs decisions and interventions, such as empowering clinical staff to support each other by taking consultations from colleagues whose clinics are running behind. Clinical practice around documenting consultations is now both more efficient and more robust, as the EPR requires notes to be captured and saved before a consultation can be closed. The use of checking boxes relating to treatment, testing or safeguarding observations – rather than manually typing notes into a box – is also speeding up the process without compromising standards. Finally, our new EPR makes it easier to see any safeguarding issues – including what previous conversations have taken place – so our clinicians are supported to identify and support vulnerable patients.”
Welcoming LSH to the Inform Health customer community, Sue Bunn, Commercial Director at Inform Health said: “Our shared vision and strong collaboration helped to deliver a smooth implementation and it’s wonderful to see our PHR and EPR systems are already delivering benefits for the service. We’re looking forward to working alongside LSH to support them to deliver optimised and patient centred provision to the people of Luton.”
Inform Health is a specialist technology provider to the sexual health, HIV and sexual assault referral centre (SARC) sectors.
For more information, please visit: https://www.informhealth.co.
