YEs we use it for reminders for primary care appointments, recalling patients for target groups, and distributing healthcare information about our practices

That's a company in Basel/Switzerland that is specialised in informing patients by SMS. http://www.memorems.ch/home/login.php

Hi,

Magne Arve Flaten is supervising a project on Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) at the University of Tromsø, where SMS is sentral in measuring pain regularly during the day.

We use SMS in our eCare system (eoskrba.si). Indeed, we have a generalized messaging system that permits also sending mails etc.

LPA

We developed an application that uses a series of web services made available by a mobile operator in our country. It is used to remind patients by sms of upcoming appointments. It allows us to mass message patients and receive answers from the patients. It is also used with psychiatric patients to remind them to take their medication.

You could contact the mobile operators to see if they have an application that allows mass messaging and evaluate how you could manage the responses. You could also develop your custom application using the services made available by a mobile operator.

Dear All, Thank you very much for your generous replies which I really appreciate. Thanks to Xavier Pastor for referring to the wonderful article on electronic reminder.

@Jose Patriarca-Almeida, thanks for sharing the information, but I would be glad to know if you have any statistics regarding using appointment and medication reminders with increased adherence which will be very interesting finding.

I am thinking of using Frontline SMS, a free program available on the web which has been used by many NGOs in developing countries to send and receive sms interventions.

Hi there

We also use SMS reminders for clinical appointments, this works along side our standards based EHR and HL7 secure messaging network of 20,000 connected users. We also completed a project with the Veteran Affairs using standards based decision support framework to generate clinical reminders (see https://sites.google.com/site/enhancedcprscds/project-definition)

Our website is http://www.medical-objects.com.au

Dear Lynden Crawford thanks a lot for your post and sharing with us your project on medical objects secure messaging between professionals. Do you have any system that communicates directly with patients for appointment reminders or providing health education messages?

There is Remindem (free) developed by colleagues at inSTEDD: http://remindem.instedd.org/en (brochure: http://static.instedd.org/remindem/instedd-remindem-en.pdf ). Expecting mothers, parents (for child immunisations), diabetics and many others have benefited from it, particularly in developing countries with limited resources.

Thanks a lot Dr Maged for sharing information on Remindem. I will try the software and share my experience.

Be aware of the costs. SMS is not free of charge. Here is what FrontlineSMS gives as an answer concerning costs:

"Any costs you might incur are determined by your airtime provider and not by FrontlineSMS."

My lab here in Victoria BC Canada has a project around this topic right now. Drop me a message and I can get you connected.

Dr Islam, you may be interested in looking at the following. It may prove technically complex as it provides an open-source system for local implementation. However, it's been used worldwide and I recommend at least taking a quick peak: http://motechsuite.org/index.html

Good luck!

For simple starting there are many websites which will provide you free texting.It is really helpful in follow up.

S. M. Shariful Islam yes we could do that. I would need to gather requirements on what your project is to give a more informed answer.