City & Hackney tPCT Screened Services launches text appointment reminders

iPLATO, the leader in mobile healthcare applications, announced today that City & Hackney Teaching Primary Care Trust has launched Patient Care Messaging for patients attending its Screening Service. iPLATO Patient Care Messaging will help to improve the service to patients in the long term: Care will delivered more efficiently and therefore be of better quality and less expensive. iPLATO Patient Care Messaging will be available to subscribing patients free of charge from March 1st onwards for City & Hackney tPCT’s Locomotor Service.

Locomotor is a specialist muscular-skeletal service that provides an alternative to potentially lengthy hospital waits. Appointment reminder messages will only be sent to patients opting into the service. City & Hackney tPCT hopes for a rapid growth of the subscriber base as it should keep the Did-Not-Attend (DNA) Rate low to provide patients with optimal access to the Screening Service.

“Mobile patient services is really the way forward” says Sham Rahim, Project Manager for Booking & Choice at the Teaching PCT. “We believe that text messaging to remind patients about their appointments is a perfect first step towards building a ‘mobile relationship’ with them. We aim to reduce missed appointments by xx% from where we are today. We wish to get as many patients as possible onto the system as quickly as possible. To achieve this we will actively call our patients to gain their consent and distribute patient information leaflets to all GP surgeries in City & Hackney. Patients are encouraged to let both their referring GP and the Screened Services team know that they wish to receive reminders.”

“City & Hackney Teaching Primary Care Trust once more proved to be innovative and forward-thinking,” says Tobias Alpsten, Managing Director of iPLATO. “The care provided by the Screened Services Team is similar to secondary care as it is based on referrals from GPs. This makes effective mobile patients services especially challenging because of the on/off relationship between the patient and the healthcare provider. We will support the City & Hackney Teaching Primary Care Trust with our technology but, more importantly, with our unparalleled experience in delivering radical improvements to cost efficiency and quality of care.

- Ends -