The agency has piloted the system, with Scotland’s Island Communications, at the Hull and East Yorkshire Woman and Children’s Hospital. The results, it reports, are incredibly promising.

As the majority of NHS appointments are missed, according to research, largely due to simple absent-mindedness, the system appears to tackle that problem head on. This in turn reduces missed appointments and helps cut costs and waiting times.

Jackie Timson, the paediatric services manager at the Yorkshire hospital, said of the pilot scheme: "During the last three months, we’ve experienced a noticeable drop in the number of patients who haven’t attended appointments.”
 
"In some cases it’s unavoidable that an appointment will be missed, but because we provide an option to reply within the reminder we send, patients can let us know through the MARS management system if they’re not able to attend and in many cases we can allocate their slot to another patient, which is a further advantage of the system.”

Mediaburst, which featured recently on How-Do with its innovative approach to cutting bike crime, is an expert in the mobile messaging and interactive telephony field.

www.mediaburst.co.uk.
 

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