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.

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Notes for Editors:

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:

Salvador Castilla
020 3178 4680
salvador.castilla@iplato.net
1 Hammersmith Grove
London W6 0NB
United Kingdom
www.iplato.net

Pictures available on request