Medical institute uses UTBox to notify patients
An Australia wide medical institute needed their front line staff to reduce the amount of time they spent on the phone individually contacting their patients for appointments.
They faced the choice of increasing staff, decreasing notifications or improving their processes to gain efficiency. Increasing staff was not an option, while decreasing notifications would result in no-show/did not attend (DNA) patients. With these concerns in mind they identified a process improvement in form of SMS notification and the UTBox Email to SMS service was chosen to supplement their existing software systems.
Simple implementation was one of the specific reasons reported as a factor in the selection of this solution. Rather then having to install new software or spend thousands on complex application development the company was able to modify their existing legacy system to be able to add the SMS functionality by using the UTBox Email to SMS service.
The modification was made by the institute’s own software vendor in less than a day as the service utilises standard email. This allowed their staff to use their existing software systems to trigger SMS being sent through to patient handsets with specific appointment reminders. As an added benefit the medical institute identified another use they had as a secondary application. Thoughtful staff had started to use use these notifications to deliver their staff shifts. This allowed for notifications of rosters at short notice without a phone call that would typically be at night or otherwise intrusive.
In summary, by implementing an automated SMS reminder system using the UTBox Email to SMS service the company found that they were able to improve their business process in a number of ways:
- reduced amount of staff time required to manage the appointments
- reduced the amount of no-shows / DNA (did not attend) patients
- reduce the amount of time in notifying staff, utilising a method favoured by their staff
