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Mobile and Wireless Services For Outpatients
Wireless Healthcare, April 2005, Pages: 21
Government health departments are still waiting for a return on large investments in IT infrastructure. However a simple mobile phone based service is already having an impact on hospital performance data. Outpatient clinics, that are using SMS based appointment reminder systems, are seeing a reduction in missed appointments or ‘Did Not Attend’ (DNAs).
Revenues from SMS patient reminder services will grow steadily over the next five years. Theoretically, if every patient were sent a text message reminding them of their appointment, UK mobile communications providers would receive revenues in excess of £20 million per annum from healthcare related text messaging. However health providers will face a major challenge migrating more than a small proportion of patients from paper based systems to the current generation of mobile services.
This report reveals that outpatient clinics that deployed SMS patient reminder systems saw DNA rates fall by up to 30% even though less than 20% of patients chose to use the service. Text message based reminder systems have been successful from day one because the demographic profiles of persistent DNAs and mobile phone users are similar. However this means users could see diminishing returns as reminder services are expanded.
SMS patient reminder services provide mobile communications vendors with an ideal entry point into the healthcare IT market. Wireless and mobile vendors who establish themselves in this market should be able to leverage their position by adding services, such as patient support and medication reminder and compliance monitoring, to their existing messaging platform. This report points to evidence that this is already happening in the field of mental healthcare where outpatient clinics and social services are under political pressure to ensure that patients keep appointments and comply with medication regimes. This report also sees a number of established IT vendors adding patient reminders to the list of outsourced services they offer hospitals.
This report also examines sales of patient paging systems could come under pressure as restrictions on the use of mobile phones in hospitals are lifted. In the future text-messaging vendors could provide systems that inform patients waiting within the outpatient clinic that the consultant is ready to see them. The ease with which patient paging can be deployed, and its relatively low cost, have been instrumental in the rapid growth in sales of systems to outpatient clinics. While patient paging is currently marketed as a technology that improves the patient’s experience of the outpatient care process, it could, when integrated with Patient Administration Systems (PAS), also be used to increase a hospital’s workflow efficiency.
*Supplied free with this report is Mobile Operators - Fully Engaged, which provides an overview of the role of mobile carriers in healthcare applications*
Also available
Mobile Operators - Fully Engaged
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