Amity is an online health and wellbeing service for people living in the Cheshire and Merseyside region. You can read more about Amity here.
Guidance on data protection and information sharing can be found here. This includes a copy of a Data Protection Impact Assessment that can be used by your organisation and an overarching Memorandum of Understanding which sets out an organisations agreement in principle to share information with the partner organisations in a responsible way.
A cost savings calculator can be found here demonstrating the savings that can be achieved by moving to digitised letters.
Amity aims to provide healthcare professionals with a digital solution for:
The platform is currently at a very early stage of development, with only a small number of patients using the service as part of several pilots taking place across the region.
A small number of hospital services across the region are currently piloting the use of Amity as a digital solution for enabling patients to view and store digital correspondence, such as hospital appointment letters.
Further pilots are planned in the near future to test other functionality within Amity, such as the questionnaire builder, which will enable healthcare professionals to create questionnaires and share these for patients to complete from within Amity.
The use of Amity for enabling patients to view digital documents relies on your NHS service using a system called Synertec. This is the system used for managing the production, printing, and posting of patient correspondence.
When a document is created, instead of the letter being printed, this system will check Amity, using the patient’s NHS Number, to see whether or not the patient has registered to use Amity. If the NHS Number is found, the digital correspondence will be made available to the patient within Amity. This will appear under the My Health > Documents menu. If not, the system will send the correspondence to print and post as normal.
If required, the system can be configured to check Amity for a ‘read receipt’ after a defined period, such as 10 days. If no read receipt is found, a copy of the letter will be printed and posted out to the patient.
If Syntech Prism is not in use within your organisation, support is available to advise on the options available, along with any business change requirements.
The Amity Programme Team has been engaging with Digital Leads across Cheshire and Merseyside to raise awareness of Amity and the use of the service for sharing digital correspondence with patients.
If you are a healthcare professional who is interested in using Amity in this way, please speak to the Digital Lead within your organisation in the first instance.
Digital Leads who are interested in exploring the use of Amity, should get in touch using our online form and a member of the Amity Programme Team will contact you.
A Communications Toolkit is in the process of being developed to help support patient engagement. This toolkit is in development and further resources and guidance will be made available.
