For a long time Health Authorities have been having kittens about the amount of people who miss their hospital appointments – and quite rightly, it’s a tremendous waste of resources, that are already stretched.
Many of the missed appointments are due to genuine mistakes where the person due at the hospital suddenly remembers that where they were supposed to be.
If this has happened to you, you’re part of the 15% that do it too.
Those afflicted with this, will be able to breath a sign of relief thanks to the combined power of Orange, iPLATO with their Patient Care Messaging, and Ealing Primary Care Trust, well, at least if they live in Ealing they will be.
Orange being involved with the project points to the means of delivery. SMS reminders will be sent to patients mobile phones automatically, thanks to the integration with the patient administration systems, already used by GPs throughout the borough.
To take part in the free trial patients register their mobile phone numbers at their surgeries.
Orange is involved through the partnership they’ve had with iPlato since 2003. They’ll be sending out the ton of SMS’s that the system will be spitting out – think of the deal like them having sold the health authority a _huge_ bundle of SMS’s. Although Orange is heading the deal, messages are sent to all networks – be a bit daft otherwise wouldn’t it?
It’s not just appointments that can be handled, Orange tell us that, “Among many benefits, text messaging prompts a better response to health promotion campaigns such as invitations to receive flu jabs or attend asthma clinics.” The word promotion could be worrying if abused.
Set at the right level of frequency, this kind of reminder is currently helpful, but any Doctor’s service that starts to abuse this by sending too many messages can be sure to get their patients unsubscribing from their service.
Mulling this over we thought that while it is a great first step, isn’t it a bit amazing that this hasn’t been done before?
Far smaller organisation have been using this idea for quite a while. Sal, my wife receives SMS reminders from her hairdresser (Jaqs of Newport – BTW can we have her hair cuts cheaper if I plug your shop?) the day before her appointments.
This marks the largest deployment of integrated text messaging in British primary care to date.
The saving for the NHS with success in this area will be considerable. Imperial College estimate that between £240 million and £380 million could be saved with country wide use of SMS reminders.
UK uber-regulator, Ofcom has finally got itself sorted out and is to allow the use of low-powered FM transmitters in the UK from 8 December. 
Following the trial in London, HD TV over Freeview has been judged as a success after the six months that it’s been running. 
Simon Fell, Director of Technology, ITV Consumer was upbeat, “We have conclusively demonstrated that HD services can run effectively alongside standard Freeview broadcasts. All major technical hurdles are behind us, and collectively we can focus on potentially providing services for the forecasted sales of 10 million flat screen TVs by 2010.” 
To me, there is something about the pleasure of listening to radio that is intrinsically linked to a discrete box that is a radio, and the PC experience does not quite match up, but the chance to tune into thousands of radio stations from the four corners of the world is something that excited me. 
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) movement got a boost this week when their first production model arrived at their offices. 
For us, the biggest surprise is the sheer smallness of it – when you see it sitting on top another ‘normal’ laptop it will be clear. 
We’ve been avid followers of the OLPC or $100 laptop as it used to be called since the 
Industry analysts Nielsen Media Research have discovered that Apple iPod-toting consumers aren’t going ga-ga for video, with the vast majority preferring to listen to music and audio podcasts rather than watch TV or movies. 
Not surprisingly this figure rises for Video iPod users, who were found to spend 11 per cent of their time watching videos. 
We know that we barely ever watch video content on our mobile players, but then we’d imagine the video-playing target demographic is considerably younger than us comparative crumblies (i.e we’re over 20). 
Like a hungry child with its drooling face depositing dribble all over the cake shop window, we’re only able to gaze at the sleek lines of Sharp’s swanky new 911SH TV phone from afar as the Japanese giant has announced that it’s for their home market only. 
Slapping in a 1 GB card would deliver a mighty 4 hours of recording, although we’re not sure how long the battery would fare when playing back videos. 
Slowly taking shape through the fug of a host of iffy Japanese web translations is the Epson Endeavor ST100, an ultra-small PC. 
The specs look like they’ll handle all your office jobs too, with the Endeavor being powered by a fairly beefy 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo T6700 mobile CPU. 
There’s also a healthy 2GB of RAM onboard, with a generous 160GB 5400rpm SATA hard disk and a DL DVD burner for storing all your stuff.