Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has selected Wellola to deliver its new patient portal platform.

As well as involving patients more in their care and being able to manage interactions, Leeds Teaching Hospitals also hopes the platform will help with plans to tackle elective waiting lists and create virtual wards.

It’s the second trust in as many days to announce a project with Wellola, after Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust announced it would be deploying the new platform as well.

The Portasana platform is a highly modularised and interoperable patient portal built in an AWS infrastructure. It will allow the trust to deliver enhanced patient-facing services across all of its seven locations. This includes the ability for patients under Leeds to view their medical records, message healthcare providers, receive educational resources and track their symptoms.

Andy Webster, chief clinical information officer and consultant in emergency medicine at Leeds Teaching Hospitals, said: “This project will help us make an important step change in the way we communicate with our patients. It will facilitate clinical information sharing, enable patients to share information about their health and provide easy, direct access to digital information leaflets, advice and guidance.

“Working with Wellola, we aim to offer our patients the very best digital experience, which supports two-way communication, and sees our patients more involved in their own healthcare.”

The implementation will start this month with plans to roll-out across all areas of the trust at a later date.

The project is being supported by Leeds Hospitals Charity, who is using funds from donations and gifts to support the recruitment of specialist roles to the project team.

Sonia Neary, CEO of Wellola, added: “It’s great to have a customer that has such an innovative vision for how they want to transform and improve patient services, and we very much look forward to delivering this programme with them.”