Mubarak Al-Kabeer Hospital's Nuclear Medicine Department

Business Needs & Challenges

Like most public healthcare services, Nuclear Medicine Department at Al-Mubarak Hospital is usually overbooked. In order to facilitate the flood of patients that require radiology-related diagnostics, the hospital opted to register patients for appointments. At the time of an appointment, patients would be served based on who's appointment is the earliest. This helped manage the expectations of the patients and improved the overall productivity of radiology staff.

Yet again, many patients would either arrive late, or completely forget about their appointment. Despite every effort to commit to the appointments schedule, some patients would tend to forget their appointment, especially if the timespan between booking and the actual appointment is longer than a week. The hospital needed a cost-effective way to remind its patients about their appointments early enough to help reduce this issue.

Characteristics of a viable solution

A viable solution should have the following capabilities:

1. Deliver notifications via the very popular Short Message Service (SMS) to patients' mobiles.
2. Automate the process of sending reminders. No manual labor should be needed.
3. Allow changing the message template to suit the needs of the hospital.
4. Provide ways to define one or more schedules for the delivery of messages.

Solution

Mubarak Al-Kabeer Hospital's Nuclear Medicine Department found that SharperReminders provides the necessary features to meet the requirements. The following features are made available:

• Fetches appointments from the existing application automatically.
• All users have to do is make sure the patient's mobile phone is registered.
• Automatically cleans data and removes incorrect phone numbers..
• Sends SMS reminders to all local telecommunications networks: Zain Ooredoo and Viva.
• Templates can be configured to allow easy customization of messages by non-technical users.
• Multiple schedules to send reminders.