Call centre technology reminds patients of appointments

Call centre technology is being used to allow hospitals to ‘Remind, Rebook and Refill’ appointments.

Following two recent contract wins, one in five of the NHS Acute Trusts and Health Boards in the UK are implementing applications from Netcall’s Appointment Management Cycle (AMC) to combat “Did not attend” (DNA) rates and manage their appointment systems in the healthcare market.

The pressure on the NHS is growing as patients’ expectations are rising, regulators impose lower budgets and demand better service, while care itself is getting more complex. The health sector has found itself having to manage patients cost effectively rather than focus solely on curing them.

High “Did not attend” rates caused by the public not attending their appointments are a major drain on resources, costing the NHS Trusts in the region of £700m a year. “The health service is caught between a rock and a hard place” (BBC, 2013) but the use of technology can be one of its greatest allies. As part of this, patient communication is expected to be one of the top three areas of future NHS IT spend, according to a recent report from EH Insider. Netcall’s Appointment Management Cycle (AMC) innovatively deals with missed appointments, leading to fewer cancellations and rescheduling.

With two new signings of the Appointment Management Cycle (AMC) this year, Netcall has become the main provider of appointment management technology to the NHS. More than 70% of UK Trusts and Health Boards now use its applications to manage patient communication and data, with outpatients in eight out of the eleven Scottish Health Boards trusting Netcall’s AMC.

The judging panel of Building Better Healthcare Awards, 2012, headed by Roy Lilley, NHS Commentator: “This seems a simple solution, but it really makes a difference to the patient experience and to the number of missed appointments, saving the health service a lot of money.”

Mark Holmes, Sales Director, Netcall: “The Did Not Attend (DNA) is a traditional method of performance measurement within the NHS, and reducing the DNA rates is a crucial step towards creating significant costs savings. Netcall’s AMC has been developed around our NHS customers’ needs and personalised according to the demands of each hospital; empowering them to ‘Remind, Rebook and Refill’ appointments efficiently. It also includes a variety of communication channels which enable Trusts to reach out to the younger, permanently on-the-go generation, one of the most problematic age groups when it comes to remembering their appointments.”