iPLATO Healthcare announced that a new feature on its market leading product - iPLATO Patient Care Messaging - allows GP surgeries to identify patients with hearing difficulties and provide them with enhanced access to healthcare. Each iPLATO surgery has its own unique mobile phone number. The new feature helps surgeries who opt to use it manage a stringent policy for enhanced access to appointment booking and ordering of repeat prescription via inbound SMS.
Overall prevalence numbers suggests that over 700,000 or one in seven patients within the iPLATO mHealth primary care network are hearing impaired. For a patient with hearing difficulty even simple tasks such as appointment booking represents major challenges because most surgeries prefer to receive such requests over the phone. iPLATO's new feature will allow surgeries empower selected patients to communicate with them via two-way SMS without opening this channel for those who can use traditional means of access.
"This new feature underlines two long standing iPLATO commitments," says Tobias Alpsten, Managing Director at iPLATO Healthcare. "Firstly, it highlights our commitment to support patients with special needs through modern technology. Many of our surgeries use the inbound SMS channel to improve services and data quality. By adding this enhanced feature we also show our commitment to work in partnership with our users to continuously improve the mHealth service they are able to offer to their patients. This new feature will be made available at no additional cost to our iPLATO Patient Care Messaging customers."
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About iPLATO
iPLATO Healthcare is an innovation company dedicated to mobile health since 2006. iPLATO's evidence based mobile health solutions have proven to improve patient access to healthcare, to enable powerful health promotion targeted at people at risk and to support people with long term conditions. Serving millions of patients and thousands of healthcare professionals every day iPLATO has emerged as the leader in mobile health. Across this network the company is running campaigns to promote smoking cessation, weight loss, childhood immunisation and pandemic awareness as well as mobile disease management services for people with diabetes, hypertension, epilepsy and HIV.