Try sending free SMS appointment reminders

Ashford & St Peter's Hospitals NHS Trust (ASPH) are using NHSmail to send free SMS text messages to their patients as reminders of their outpatient appointments.

Many NHS trusts already operate an SMS reminder service for patients but at a cost. Ian Mackenzie, Director of Performance, Information and Facilities at ASPH implemented the system.

He said: "NHSmail allows us to text our patients free of charge, why would anyone be paying for a system to do this when they can do it for free?"

If you agree and would like to set up a reminder service for your organisation you'll need:

• a data source with the appointment information
• an NHSmail account to send from (ideally a 'non-person' account)
• an application to extract the appointment information and provide it to the email service e.g. MS Access or Outlook

Now for the technical bit....Ashford & St Peter's use iSoft Clinicon as their Patient Administration System and appointment data is extracted and stored in a data warehouse (an SQL server).

The script then sends the information to Outlook, and instructs the NHSmail account to send an appointment reminder to each mobile number adding @sms.nhs.net to the end of each one.

The trust estimates that it took about a day of a programmer's time to write and test the script. Now it runs automatically every day with no further intervention and the process costs them nothing to run!

Whilst the exact system in use at Ashford and St Peter's is specific to their local set-up, the process can be replicated anywhere with a degree of IT expertise and the appropriate technology.

This provides, for a minimum outlay, a patient appointment reminder service that is entirely free of charge to the Trust - no purchase costs and no call costs.

If you would like further information about setting up an SMS service using NHSmail please contact feedback@nhs.net