August 2, 2006 at 11:04 am · Authored by Ewan · Filed under SMS

Link: SMS plan to tackle patient no-shows - Breaking News - National - Breaking News.

Text messages may hold the key to halving the number of
appointment no-shows at Australian hospitals, an innovative study
has found.
Researchers at Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne discovered
they could cut the number of missed appointments dramatically by
sending each patient an SMS three days in advance.

So, this is nothing new per se — there have been many trials around the world, not least in the UK demonstrating that SMS updates can cut missed appointments by around a third.

In this Australian study, no-shows were reduced from 20 to 10 percent in three months. That’s a lot of clinical time saved!