Irish hospital group cuts DNAs by text
- 16 February 2010
St Vincent Hospital Group in Dublin has reduced its did-not-attend rate by 30% after implementing a messaging system that notifies patients of their appointments and allows them to reschedule.
Defero, the application from InterSystems and its application partner, Grapevine solutions, is based on Intersystem’s Caché high performance object database and enables two way text communications between staff and patients.
St Vincent’s receives around 144,000 patients each year and has an average DNA rate of 23%, which is equal to around 30,000 missed appointments.
Since the messaging service has been introduced the rates have been reduced by 30% which is believed to save around €750,000 a year based on each missed appointment costing €80.
Phil Birchall, healthcare business development director at InterSystems, said: “This is a good example of how developing applications with Caché enables our partners to innovate and answer the customer’s needs.
The hospitals, which already use Intersystem’s Ensemble as an integration engine to connect its healthcare applications, used its BlueNote integration service supplier to create an interface between the hospital’s patient administration system and Defero, which enables users to access the PAS on demand.
The trust is now considering using Defero for other communication needs including within the hospital’s contingency plans for a pandemic.
Jim Brennan, managing director at BlueNote said: “InterSystems Ensemble provided an excellent framework to analyse, gather and transmit the Patient Booking details in a fast, secure and cost-effective way. We are working to provide similar integration in other sites.”
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