Pre-surgical questionnaires at NHS scale

Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, CEO of Patients Know Best, presents how PKB uses Formbox and Aidbox to digitize pre-surgical questionnaires for the NHS in England. PKB serves roughly 34 NHS trusts — about a quarter of England's healthcare providers — across 160 clinical teams, with 268 forms in production.

The workflow: PKB digitizes questionnaires that customers hand over as Word documents, PDFs, or paper photocopies; clinical teams trigger them via the PKB UI or API; patients receive them through the NHS App (about 90% adult registration in England) or the PKB website; and the answers land natively in Aidbox as structured FHIR resources with SNOMED codes. Because PKB integrated with NHS Login in 2020, patients using the app get single sign-on with no additional identity verification.

The main use cases — pre-op fitness assessment, waiting-list validation, and patient-initiated follow-up — reduce "just in case" appointments and let clinical teams focus on the patients who need attention. Mohammad also covers how PKB handles SNOMED code updates: driven by the clinical team, and preserved within the same questionnaire ID whenever the data must stay comparable over time.

Same stack as PKB: Formbox is the SDC-native form-building product PKB runs in production — questionnaire authoring, patient-facing rendering, and structured extraction into Aidbox in one loop.