May 14, 2007 at 6:38 pm · Authored by Alex · Filed under Mobile Services, SMS

We touched briefly on iPLATO and their Patient Care Messaging System a couple of weeks back, when I posted about how GPs in Islington have had six times more success persuading smokers to quit by texting them then by traditional methods.

iPLATO have this week made their new version of the Patient Care Messsaging System available to their NHS user base, and already it seems to be very popular. There’s a neat new feature in version 3 that automatically updates the patient record when they text in, which saves a lot of time having to retrieve data from one system and manually enter it into another. According to one user of the system, this sort of thing used to take hours - and now it’s done in a matter of minutes.

“I was really impressed by the new look and feel of the iPLATO system”, notes Stuart Hall, Practice IT Manager from the Vale Medical Centre in Forest Hill, South London. “It’s much easier to navigate through and is very intuitive. With the new ‘write-back’ feature the process of contacting patients is massively streamlined. We can now reach groups of patients by text message, receive their replies and have it read-coded and logged into the patient record almost instantaneously. In the past this process would have taken us hours, now its take just minutes.”

Great news, it’s about time the NHS became a bit more mobile-savvy. There’s already other companies out there doing appointment reminders, but with this new two way interactive feature iPLATO appear to be gaining a big lead in the market.