Portsmouth Hospitals Text & Voice appointment reminder contract award

Following a rigorous tender process, the contract was awarded on behalf of the Trust who will benefit by seeing significant reductions in missed appointments (DNA’s) and administrative resources used to rebook missed appointments.

 

For Portsmouth Hospitals Outpatient Project Manager Mandy Mugridge, the proven track record of delivery to other Trusts was a major factor in Healthcare’s favour. She said “We are keen to reduce our DNA rate that will reduce outpatient waiting times and increase performance against targets such as national outpatients’ targets.”

 

She added “When contacting their Trust reference sites, they all responded very positively about the services and benefits delivered. There are a  lot of companies who state they can deliver these services, but few have the actually experience of Healthcare and a proven delivery track record. The additional marketing support provided to ensure both staff and patient awareness of the project was also an important factor in choosing Healthcare Communications.”

 

Healthcare Communications Director Michael Cunningham said: “This is a major contract success with the Trust providing approximately 600,000 outpatient appointments a year. “Following the tender process, we welcome the opportunity of working with the Trust, alongside our partners O2 and Voice Sage to deliver the benefits available via Patientxt™.”

 

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 15 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.

“We have significantly improved the user preferences within Patientxt™.^” Mr. Cunningham added. “This enables users to choose channels appropriate to their patient demographic such as text and voice with extensive reporting options. Additional reports have also been added in line with user feedback that ensures that benefits can be tracked.”

 

Ends

Further information:

Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust
Mandy Mugridge
02392 286000 ext 1168
mandy.mugridge@porthsop.nhs.uk

Healthcare Communications UK
Michael Cunningham
0161 4294151
mcunningham@healthcomm.co.uk