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Press Release: Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust partners with Ampersand Health

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Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust partners with Ampersand Health to provide free self-management platform to patients living with IBD and their clinicians.

2nd February 2021 London – Ampersand Health has today announced its partnership with Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust to roll out the inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) platform My IBD Care which supports patients living with Crohn’s disease and Ulcerative colitis and facilitates remote monitoring and communications between these patients and their clinicians.

 

The platform will help support approximately 2,800 IBD patients managed by the Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust and their clinicians – including Consultant Gastroenterologists, IBD Nurses, and Colorectal Surgeons.

 

The chronic disease management app helps individuals to better self-manage their IBD on a day-to-day basis, bringing together a personal health record, medication and appointment reminders, daily lifestyle tracking (including mood, stress, exercise, diet, pain and sleep) and a library of easy-to-access lifestyle and wellbeing courses. Patients are also able to asynchronously communicate via the app with the clinical team and submit questionnaires providing remote insight to their health status.

 

Commenting on the partnership,  Helen Osinski, IBD Advanced Nurse practitioner Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust said, “Patients living with Crohn’s disease and Ulcerative colitis can face personal challenges every day, from managing often painful symptoms and monitoring their diet, to dealing with sleep disruption and psychological stress. As a clinician I want to best help to manage their condition and avoid overburdening patients with hospital visits which hold associated travel and time costs. Innovative new tools like My IBD Care are an essential part of the future of long-term condition care. They can help support patients in the management of their condition whilst also recording information that can improve clinical decision making. To be truly successful, new health apps need to fit within current care pathways and patient routines – something we are confident that My IBD Care does.“

 

Developed in partnership with leading patient support group Crohn’s & Colitis UK, expert clinicians from King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Barts Health NHS Trust, and patients themselves, My IBD Care can be used by clinicians to confidentially receive real-time information from patients. This can help them to improve decision making, lead to better treatment outcomes and increase hospital capacity as clinicians can triage patients, prioritising whether someone needs to see their clinician urgently based on the information they have shared through My IBD Care.

 

Nader Alaghband, Co-Founder & CEO of Ampersand Health added, “COVID-19 has placed unparalleled pressure upon the NHS and part of our role as healthtech innovators is to see how we can best help improve clinical capacity and hospital efficiency. I’m delighted that we are able to partner with Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust and put My IBD Care in the hands of patients. In addition to freeing up resources and time for providers, our products can help patients address the psychological burden of isolation for patients through our health and wellbeing courses. Combined with the self-management features on our platform and the benefit that patient-clinician communications via My IBD Care can help  avoid any unnecessary trips to hospital, we believe that My IBD Care is the future of IBD patient management that delivers optimal clinical, behavioural and psychological support, without compromising on the quality of care they receive.”

ENDS

Notes to Editors

For further information, to request images or interviews, please contact:

Jeremy Andrews e: jeremy@ampersandhealth.co.uk

Sophie Luis                     e: sophie@somx.co.uk              t: + 44 (0) 20 7112 8556


About Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust 

Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust covers the whole of Worcestershire, delivering services from 3 hospitals, in Worcester, Redditch and Kidderminster. The Trust sees around 140,000 A&E attendances and about 500,000 outpatient appointments annually and is committed to continuing to build on 2019’s greatly improved CQC ratings and rising to the unprecedented challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

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