News
Text messaging patients for anti-smoking campaign gives 46% response
rate
24 June 2008
GP-led text messaging campaigns by Barking & Dagenham PCT have
highlighted the effectiveness of iPLATO Patient Care Messaging for the
identification of smokers. Results from the first 10 surgeries to run
the campaign have revealed average patient response rates of 46% — a
major improvement when compared with alternative methods of collecting
the same information.
The smoking status ‘update’ campaigns were run with the aim of
reducing smoking prevalence in a patient population. The campaigns
effectively establishing smoking status and subsequently referred
‘quitters’ to smoking cessation support and advice from searches made on
their GP system.
The surgeries sent out a text message asking patients to text back
their current smoking status. Patients who received this message were
able to text back their status via a reply text that arrived at the
surgery as an email (to a predefined surgery email address).
Jim McManus, Associate Director of Health Improvement at Barking &
Dagenham PCT, said, "The iPLATO platform is proving to be an invaluable
tool for the support of health promotion initiatives. Without the
effective identification and engagement of at-risk groups in the
community, it can be difficult to direct relevant services successfully.
These recent results have shown how effective Patient Care Messaging has
been at supporting GP-led health promotion campaigns. Compared to other
potential approaches these campaigns have also proven to be cost
effective."
Funded centrally by the PCT, the service has been adopted by over 80%
of Barking & Dagenham GPs and is being used to address important public
health concerns such as smoking, flu, childhood immunisations and
obesity. The system works by integrating with the GP clinical system
where patient records are stored. Surgeries can use the clinical
information they hold to target specific patients for health promotion
campaigns and send groups of patients text-message invitations to
clinics.
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