New Patient Care Messaging technology to combat £ 162 million lost in missed appointments

iPLATO, specialist developers in mobile and wireless technology applications, has launched the next generation of Patient Care Messaging (PCM), a new system that integrates with existing healthcare administrative and clinical systems to send automated appointment reminders to patients.

The new patient service was launched at a celebratory occasion in London on August 26th, attended by a multitude of public and private healthcare organisations. iPLATO presented the new version of Patient Care Messaging to an interested crowd and formally launched the service by sending a text message to all people present.

Over the past few years absenteeism has been highlighted as a serious issue and the Doctor Patient Partnership has, since 1999, been running a campaign to highlight missed GP and practice nurse appointments. Its independent research* revealed that UK patients miss 13 million GP and practice nurse appointments per year, the reason most frequently cited being simply: ‘I forgot’.

With each GP appointment estimated to cost at least £18 it is estimated that, missed doctors appointments cost the NHS a staggering £162 million a year.

“With the public announcement of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) two years ago NHS Trusts are now obliged to take certain steps to introduce new IT systems and services to benefit both NHS staff and patients,” explains Arjen Soetekouw of iPLATO. “Appointment reminders have not been included as a requirement of the NPfIT but one of its major aims is the provision of an electronic booking (Choose and Book) service that will allow patients to book their appointments, at a time convenient to them.

“iPLATO’s PCM system is designed to complement the Choose and Book service. With a national roll out of PCM it would easily be a valuable extension to the national IT infrastructure, as both initiatives have similar goals and require similar patient data.”

Patient Care Messaging aims to proactively reduce absenteeism and improve the quality of care. It is based on iPLATO’s SMS (short message service) technology and runs over Orange’s gateway services which control the message delivery to thousands of patients. A server system managed by iPLATO is hosted within NHSnet, the NHS’ existing secure administration network. It collates data from the clinical systems and transfers these into text messages to be sent to the patient’s mobile phones at a set interval prior to their appointment.

The patient can then subsequently choose to respond to the reminder by confirming, rescheduling or cancelling the appointment by either calling the healthcare site or replying with an SMS message. If an SMS message is sent in reply, it is converted by iPLATO’s system into an email and delivered to the healthcare site’s administration.

iPLATO has several pilot projects running with NHS Trusts across London, including the Islington Primary Care Trust and the North East London Mental Health Trust, which so far are receiving very positive feedback indicating that the Patient Care Messaging is having a positive impact on absenteeism.

Arjen Soetekouw of iPLATO commented: “Healthcare managers have by now tried a number of different ways to reduce absenteeism, for example, telephone calls and letters to remind patients but these methods are usually relatively ineffective or disproportionately time consuming. With our Patient Care Messaging system, appointment reminders are automatically sent, without the need for intervention from healthcare staff, to patients’ mobile phones, which are inherently personal devices and thus always carried by the user. A guaranteed way of reaching patients without wasting healthcare resources.

“With the ongoing National Programme and the emphasis on improving healthcare services the issue of absenteeism is becoming increasingly pertinent and a problem that if tackled appropriately could help eliminate wasted resources.

“Patient Care Messaging is a means for healthcare organisations to effectively reduce the number of ‘did not attend’ patients. It is not just a ‘quick win’ solution but a maintainable system that guarantees results. It is also a system that can be used in conjunction with other IT solutions, as and when they are introduced according to the NPfIT schedule, to improve the efficiency of quality of healthcare in the UK.”

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Notes for Editors:

*The Doctor Patient Partnership (DPP) and Institute of Healthcare Management survey (August 2004), conducted for the DPP’s ‘Keep it or Cancel it’ campaign, revealed:

• · 9 million missed GP appointments per year
• · Just under 4 million missed practice nurse appointments per year
• · Missed GP appointments cost around £162 million per year (estimating that a GP appointment costs £18)
• · 37% of GP practices believe that reminding patients about their appointments could reduce these figures
• · 67% of practices think that patients ‘forget’ their appointments.

The survey was conducted with 707 GP surgeries throughout the UK.

About iPLATO

iPLATO is a privately owned limited company founded in London in the autumn of 1999. In 2003, iPLATO was awarded a SMART Feasibility Grant by the Department of Trade & Industry to study the feasibility for national implementation of a system to remind outpatients about scheduled appointments using text messaging technology.

Since completing the study, the company has invested substantial resources towards overcoming the barriers to entry of the healthcare market and now provides successful healthcare solutions to NHS organisations throughout the United Kingdom - building a promising business around its flagship service ‘Patient Care Messaging’.

The European Venture Contest, organised by the European Commission, recognised iPLATO as one of the top ten early stage technology ventures ready to “reshape their industry and to conquer the global market” and featured on the Red Herring Europe Top 200 of companies to watch in 2006. iPLATO began 2008 with extensive (PCT funded) roll out of Patient Care Messaging to GP surgeries across 10 Primary Care Trusts.

Press contact:

Julia Hanley
020 3178 4676
julia.hanley@iplato.net
One Lyric Square,  W6 0NB, London, United Kingdom
www.iplato.net 
Pictures available on request