Barts and The London NHS Trust reduce missed appointments with Orange's patient appointment reminder service

Orange has today announced that Barts and the London Hospital NHS Trust has significantly reduced the number of missed outpatient appointments since the implementation of Orange Health Gateway, an automatic appointment reminder text service. The service, which is powered by iPlato, was launched in August 2010.

To help reduce the number of missed appointments, the Trust selected Orange Health Gateway, a two way service, which enables it to send timely, personalised patient appointment reminders via SMS. The Trust sends approximately 2,000 texts each day and receives around 100 replies requesting to cancel  or reschedule appointments, helping to improve productivity and enable the long-term improvement of patient care.  Since the implementation of text reminders, the number missed appointments has reduced by over 20 per cent in some services.

Gregory Bird, Deputy General Manager, Outpatient Services at Barts and the London NHS Trust said, “This kind of two way texting system turns a simple SMS into a productivity tool, enabling patients to quickly and easily notify us if they wish to cancel or reschedule their appointment. This two way communication helps save time and hospital resources, and the cancelled appointments can be reallocated to another patient. The service allows us to optimise attendance rates and better manage capacity and demand. Detailed system reports also help us to improve data quality. Patient care is at the heart of everything we do and appointment text reminders play a key part in this.”

Kate Jack, Head of Public Sector and Health at Orange, said, “This project is all about enabling more effective patient communication. Orange Health Gateway is a simple but effective tool that allows hospitals to make substantial time and efficiency savings. Mobile technology is revolutionising how hospitals operate and, with patient numbers increasing and staff under increasing pressure to meet efficiency targets, it has never been more important.”

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About Orange UK
Orange is the key brand of the France Telecom Group, one of the world's leading telecommunications operators. With almost 131 million customers, the Orange brand now covers Internet, television and mobile services in the majority of countries where the Group operates.

In the UK, Orange provides high quality GSM coverage to 99% of the UK population, and 3G coverage to more than 93%.

Orange and any other Orange product or service names included in this material are trade marks of Orange Brand Services Limited.

On July 1 2010, the company became part of Everything Everywhere, one company that runs two of Britain's most famous brands - Orange UK and T-Mobile UK - with plans to transform the industry by giving customers instant access to everything, everywhere, offering them the best value, best choice and best network coverage in the country. Everything Everywhere Limited is the UK’s biggest communications company, with a combined customer base of almost 28 million people and more than 720 retail stores across the country. Everything Everywhere Limited is registered at Hatfield Business Park, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, AL10 9BW under the registered company number 02382161.

For more information please call the Orange Press Office             0870 3731500      , or visit www.orange.co.uk/newsroom

About iPLATO
iPLATO Healthcare is an innovation company dedicated to mobile health since 2004. iPLATO’s evidence based mobile health solutions have proven to improve patient access to healthcare, to enable powerful health promotion targeted at people at risk and to support people with long term conditions.
Serving millions of patients and thousands of healthcare professionals every day iPLATO has emerged as the leader in mobile health. Across this network the company is running campaigns to promote smoking cessation, weight loss, childhood immunisation and pandemic awareness as well as mobile patient support services for people with diabetes, hypertension, epilepsy, COPD and HIV.