Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust has slashed expensive missed appointments by nearly 40% and cut outpatient waiting times following the introduction of a Trust-wide interactive patient messaging service.

Using mobiles and landline telephones, the system reminds patients of upcoming appointments and enables them to quickly and easily cancel appointments no longer required.

In just three months since introducing the text and voice reminder system across all outpatient appointments, the Trust has seen a significant reduction in so-called Did Not Attends (DNAs) – down 38.3% in July 2010 than a year earlier (for follow-up appointments).

As a result, Trust has been able to re-use an extra 1,776 appointments that would otherwise have been wasted, a move it says has helped to reduce waiting times and has enabled the Trust to save money by scheduling fewer clinics that are better attended.

And if the success of the first three months using the system, based on technology from mobile supplier O2, continues throughout the year, the Trust will generate between 7,000 and 9,000 extra outpatient appointments.

“We commissioned this service as part of our ongoing work to bring down DNAs and improve the efficiency of our outpatient clinics,” said Mandy Mugridge, outpatient project manager at the Trust. “Now because waiting times are coming down, we also no longer need to schedule extra clinics at a high cost.”

Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust is one of the largest in England. It runs 1,379 outpatient clinics each month – totalling around 600,000 appointments a year.

The project involved a specialist supplier called between Healthcare Communications, O2 Health and Voice Sage successfully delivered the two-way text and voice reminder system for patients.

Source: http://www.publictechnology.net/sector/nhs-health/portsmouth-hospitals-reduces-cost-and-waiting-times