UK National Health mail system sends 250,000 texts per month
Link: E-Health Insider Primary Care :: NHSmail promotes free SMS for reminders
Contractors, Cable & Wireless’ head of frameworks, Ian Fowler, told E-Health Insider: “Since we launched the NHSmail service, we have seen the use of the SMS functionality grow. Currently we are seeing around 250,000 texts sent across the service per month, but we see the capabilities of this going much further.â€
This is good news. The facility is available to any NHS doctor’s surgery — my only issue, I don’t know if the return-path for the messages is set. I think it’ll just be fire-and-forget. Ideally it would be useful if you could reply to your appointment reminder from your doctor — and for that reply to be delivered as an email into their inbox for action. I don’t think they do that yet. Anyway, brilliant to see the medium being used.
Ewan, this is exactly what we do for Virgin Media (formerly ntl). By using a virtual mobile number as a reply path their customers can respond when they are reminded about an appointment. This allows them to reschedule or ask questions without entering call centre hell.
Our system just fires back an immediate response telling them when one of the Virgin Media team will get in contact, setting their expectations. The call centre operator can then send a text back to the customer or call whichever is most appropriate.
The result, customer get’s a better service and Virgin Media saves money, sweet.
Posted by Adam on October 30th, 2007 at 6:29 pm.It is very interestering to see that the NHS is adopting a channel which is used by a huge portion of the population. I am aware of another platform by iPLATO which is widely being used within the NHS as well for appointment reminders and health promotion.
That platform allows patients to reply to the text message, which is then forwarded back to their surgery/clinic as an email to a designated surgery email address. Further to this the iPLATO system is automated which I guess would save alot of time compared to manually messaging patients.
Posted by Jagdish Ganapathi on October 31st, 2007 at 11:03 am.