Herefordshire and Worcestershire ICB have commissioned the licence of the digital social prescribing App ‘Joy’ for 1 year for all practices across Worcestershire.
The specific function and feature of Joy is that it integrates with practice clinical systems, EMIS. Joy codes back into EMIS. This allows all social prescribing activity to be tracked, monitored and the outcomes recorded against patient records. This provides practices and PCNs with oversight of patient needs, a better understanding of patient demands, where there are possible gaps against need and support evidence of the value of social prescribing. Joy will enable PCNs to dive into referral and outcome data. This includes information about the number of referrals from each practice, the main reasons cited for referrals, how the intervention has helped to reduce the number of GP appointments annually, and much more.The anticipated go-live date for the Joy app across Worcestershire is likely to be towards the end of July 2024.
The Joy app is different from Worcestershire County Council’s Community Services Directory, which will be relaunched in Autumn 2024. The Directory provides signposting to a wide range of organisations and groups to help connect people to health and wellbeing services local to them, there are currently over 500 organisations and services registered. It is a fully searchable public resource, and social prescribers can direct patients to the directory for more information about local groups that can meet their needs. As part of the relaunched directory, there will be capacity for professionals to have accounts on the Community Services Directory that will enable them to save favourites that are referred to regularly as well as the ability to send live links to clients or share shortlists of services that may be relevant to them. Whilst the Directory doesn’t integrate with EMIS, we are exploring ways to link it with the Joy app. For example, we could use data from the Directory to guide the services listed on the Joy app for referrals.