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IT solution saves money by helping reduce missed appointments
MISSED appointments are estimated to cost the NHS more than £600m a year - enough to run two large hospitals.
But one health trust in Ireland is working to reduce this figure through the implementation of an award-winning IT solution.
Healthcare IT specialist, InterSystems, and its application partner, Grapevine Solutions, have installed the Defero messaging system at St Vincent’s Hospital Group, reducing its ‘did not attend’ (DNA) rates by as much as 30%.
Commended in the Best Use of IT category at the prestigious Irish Healthcare Awards 2009, the Defero solution was developed on InterSystem’s Cache object database and enables the organisation to send text messages to notify and remind patients of upcoming appointments.
“This means the hospital can better manage the ratio of new patients to returning patients, reduce overbooking and optimise the use of their care provider and resource availability” Prior to installation, St Vincent’s - a major academic teaching hospital affiliated to University College Dublin – had an average DNA rate of 23% from a total of 143,000 appointments a year. As a result of the deployment, those figures are expected to reduce to just over 20,000, bringing cost savings of approximately €750,000.
A spokesman for InterSystems said: “Like most hospitals, St Vincent’s had previously overbooked appointment slots, for example allowing 50 to be made with the expectation that only 30 would be met. Now the hospital uses Defero, more patients remember to attend and rescheduling is more efficient as patients reply earlier when they cannot attend. This means the hospital can better manage the ratio of new patients to returning patients, reduce overbooking and optimise the use of their care provider and resource availability. Over time the group expects this to have a positive effect on reducing patient waiting lists.”
St Vincent’s had already installed InterSystem’s Ensemble, a platform for integration and the development of connected applications. Therefore, the hospital’s integration service supplier, BlueNote, create an Ensemble interface between the existing patient administration system (PAS) and Defero. This enables users to access PAS information on demand.
Jim Brennan, BlueNote managing director, said: “InterSystems Ensemble provided an excellent framework to analyse, gather and transmit the patient booking details in a fast, secure and cost-effective way and we are now working to provide similar integration in other sites.”
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