The people of Otago and Southland will soon be benefitting from this new initiative in their areas.
A new initiative using mhealth technology has been designed to provide assistance across the regions of Otago and Southland in order to better bring together General Practice and the patients for whom they are providing care.
The new system is meant to provide a number of services directly to the patient in order to ensure better care.
Southern PHO, with Southern DHB’s support, has contracted a company named Vensa health in order to put their practice to patient messaging system into place, called the TXT2Remind. It is meant to use mhealth technology to allow general practitioners to be able to deliver appointment immunization and Smoking A and B reminders, in addition to a number of other key medical messages directly to their patients. These are sent by way of text message and interactive mobile content delivery.
The mhealth system will be provided free of charge to health providers such as about 80 general practitioners.
Southern PHO will be providing the mhealth system to these healthcare providers at no charge. The organization serves approximately 290,000 patients south of the Waitaki. Among those who will benefit from the free service include the health providers who are Maori based.
According to the Southern PHO chief executive, Ian Macara, “Our aim is to enable people to maintain and/or improve their health and well being. TXT2Remind will help more people access primary care as and when they need to. It’s a really effective way to reach our community, some elements of which are highly mobile.”
Macara went on to say that the mhealth system will have the ability to reduce the missed appointment rates and will help healthcare providers to enjoy greater efficiency overall. He explained that it is a fast and simple way for providers to be able to keep up contact with their patients, while simultaneously reducing the amount of labor involved in order to achieve that goal. By doing this, it will mean that less clinician time will be required per patient, so that a larger number of people can be served.
