Press release

The company, which already works with almost a quarter of all NHS Trusts in England*, has been appointed to the Patient & Non-Patient Communications National Framework Contract to provide its Patientxt™ system for both text and voice messaging.

The contract was awarded by a collaboration of 10 Procurement Hubs representing over 250  Trusts throughout the country.  The resulting framework will enable the Trusts to benefit from quicker procurement of patient messaging services, which are becoming increasingly popular due to the many time and efficiency benefits they provide.

Patientxt™ is proven to significantly reduce missed appointments (DNAs) by as much as 47%; it also reduces administrative costs by replacing time-consuming outbound phone calls with targeted text messages. 

Patientxt™ from Healthcare Communications is an EMIS accredited product; the company announced the framework appointment  at the 2009 EMIS National User Group Conference today.

Healthcare Communications Managing Director Michael Cunningham said: “This is a major contract that will enable more NHS Trusts to benefit from the time and efficiency saving benefits of our Patientxt™ technology.

“We offer clients the ability to tailor messaging channels according to local needs and we provide detailed reporting to track the benefits of using the service.”

 

Sean Riddell, EMIS Managing Director, said: “This is great news for one of our long-standing partners.  Helping the NHS to improve efficiency and services to patients is the key focus for all of our partners, and indeed EMIS itself.”

www.healthcomm.co.uk

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Notes to editors

• Introduced in 2003, Patientxt™ was one of the first text messaging solutions available to the NHS and is now used by 105 Secondary and Primary Care Trusts – equivalent to 24%* of all Trusts in England successfully sending over 10 million messages to date.
• Years of experience in implementing trust-wide projects have led to significant system enhancements together with advanced options such as two way reply, long numbers, short codes and keywords.

* Calculation is 105 Patientxt client systems active in 2009, from a total of 432 Trusts in England (188  PCT’s, 185 NHS Acute/Foundation  & 59 Mental Health sourced from www.nhs.uk )

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Further information:
Michael Cunningham
0161 4294151
mcunningham@healthcomm.co.uk