Using SMS Services to Save Costs and Improve Hospital Efficiency

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Using SMS Services to Save Costs and Improve Hospital Efficiency

 

Does this situation sound familiar to you?

You have booked a doctor’s appointment but due to unforeseen circumstances you cannot make the scheduled appointment time. This is not a major issue for an individual as they can simply book another appointment. However when you consider that this situation happens every day in every hospital around the world, it all adds up to a tremendous waste of resources.

For the hospital, these missed appointments have a significant impact on cost and performance levels. There is a cost associated with each missed appointment as the doctors, nurses, theatre staff etc. cannot easily be redeployed when it becomes obvious that the patient has not turned up. Ideally the hospital needs to rebook any cancelled appointments efficiently by rescheduling another patient into the timeslot. When you look at all of the missed appointments for all departments of an entire hospital over the course of a year, it is easy to begin to appreciate why this is such a problem.

Luckily, there is a straightforward cure – the use of SMS services. Hospitals can send SMS reminders to patients in advance, reminding them about the details of their appointment. The patient can then reply with a re-confirmation or rejection which will automatically update the data in the Health Information System. Having access to this information earlier means proactive action can be taken to book another patient into the free timeslot. Not only does this save money for the hospital but also gives patients a better overall service.

The latest advances in technology means that there are various mobile messaging services that can add value in the healthcare sector, for example:

• Patient reminders about upcoming appointments
• Allowing patients to reconfirm or to cancel appointments via SMS
• Vaccination reminders for parents
• Blood donor advertisements
• Enabling patients to send in medical records, e.g. blood sugar readings
• Reminders for certain medications
• Personalized medical newsletters

In the future these services will become commonplace but for now, there are a relatively small number of hospitals using this technology. It is my hope that in five to ten years time all hospitals will have embraced this new approach and we look back and think how did we ever cope without these services?

via czachara.blogspot.com

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