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Patients can be texted a reminder of their appointment
A text message reminder service aims to reduce the 4 ½ million outpatient appointments, which are missed each year.
Appearing at this year's Smart Healthcare Expo at Earls Court, Remind Patients could save the health service a possible £240-370 million a year.
The system reminds people about their hospital appointment 48 hours before by text message or phone call, allowing patients the time to change or cancel their appointment.
Remind Patients (www.remindpatients.com), which is available to hospitals free from upfront or annual charges, is a cost-effective solution to reducing missed appointments with the hospital only paying for the reminders sent.
The hospital will be able to send out phone calls and text messages to patients with a mobile.
Remind Patients can ensure that other people on the doctor's waiting list can be contacted in time and informed of new availability.
In a study led by the Imperial College of London, mobile technology was reported to deliver key benefits to public services.
Using text message appointment reminders in trials have shown a 30-50 per cent decline in missed hospital and doctor's appointments. The service will also reduce administration time spent sending letters and making phone calls.
The Government has invested £12.4bn in the NHS Connecting for Health IT programme which is set to revolutionise the way the NHS delivers care through the use of technology.
The programme aims to drive efficiency in healthcare costs and improve the overall levels of service provided. Mobile technology has the potential to support this by offering direct and convenient access for patients to their healthcare.
Stephen Clarke, Managing Director of the company behind Remind Patients, said: "Remind Patients will help hospitals and surgeries to save time, effort and money on reminding people about their forthcoming appointments.
"In addition to the Remind Patients service, we are also offering Call Patients an innovative notification system designed to allows the user to write any message to a particular patient or group of patients, for example, to take medication, test results, cancelled clinics etc or to regularly update patients about clinic or hospital activities such as, informing patients of a new doctor or a change in surgery opening hours."
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