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St Vincent’s Hospital Group have reduced their Did Not Attend (DNA) rates by 30% thanks to the Defero messaging application from InterSystems application partner, Grapevine Solutions.
Grapevine’s Defero messaging application was designed to make it very easy for users to send text messages to notify and remind patients of appointments, but it provides many more opportunities to communicate cost-effectively with patients, staff, and others.
Defero is a messaging application that was developed on the InterSystems Caché high performance object database and in 2009 at the prestigious Irish Healthcare Awards, Grapevine received a ‘Best Use of IT’ commendation for Defero.
Like most other hospitals, St Vincent’s had previously overbooked appointment slots, for example allowing 50 to be made with the expectation that only 30 appointments would be met. Now that the hospital uses Defero more patients remember to attend their appointment and rescheduling is more efficient as patients reply earlier when they cannot attend.
This means that the hospital can better manage the ratio of new patients to returning patients, reduce over-booking, and optimise the use of their care provider and resource availability. Over time the group expect this to have a positive effect on reducing patient waiting lists.
Phil Birchall, Healthcare Business Development Director, InterSystems commented: “This is a good example of how developing applications with Caché enables our partners to innovate and answer the customer’s need. Every hospital wants to improve patient services and make cost savings.”
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