Public Sector Roundup: IT for local health

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Texting cuts missed appointments by 27 per cent

Text messaging has helped cut missed appointments by 27 per cent over the past year in a pilot of an iPlato communication service in Lewisham Primary Care Trust.

Patients simply register to receive reminders and information direct to their mobile phone. The service now covers 43 per cent of the population in trial area.

Marie Searle, Practice Manager at Honor Oak Practice, said: "We have an ethnically and socially very diverse population in Lewisham. A vast majority of patients already use their mobile phone to run their daily lives and our experience of using this system from both the staff and patients" perspective has been very positive."

Tobias Alpsten, Managing Director of iPLATO, said: " We also hope to achieve similar results with other PCTs because, if rolled out throughout the NHS in England, we could save over 2.7 million GP appointments and 1.3 million Practice Nurse appointments per year by simply replicating our success in Lewisham."

Department of Health launches life expectancy site

The Department of Health has announced a new online site, the Health Inequalities Intervention tool, to alert councils and local health services to health and deprivation issues in their areas.

The tool is designed to help with planning and commissioning. For example, it lets PCTs calculate the number of people who may need treatment for cardiovascular disease and then find them, and encourage them to visit their local GP.

Dr Bobbie Jacobson, vice-chair of the Association of Public Health Observatories (APHO) and Director of the London Health Observatory said: "Our tool is the first of its kind to provide hard-edged, local evidence to planners and commissioners, on the causes of their life expectancy gap and how it can be reduced. The tool is easy to use and saves local agencies time and analytical effort."

Computer forensics via a mobile phone

Forensic computer experts Evidence Talks have shown crime police a new way of remotely accessing a computer using a mobile phone.

Managing director Andrew Sheldon used a phone to take a copy of a the hard drive of a computer sitting 70 miles away using a web connection while at the National Police Improvement Agency's annual conference.

The Remote Forensics solution could let police respond more quickly in their investigations, Sheldon said. Mr Sheldon commented: "It gives the ability to respond immediately to intelligence discovered on systems during a multi-point raid," he said in a statement. "By deploying Remote Forensics across the intelligence community, when there is a raid in multiple geographical locations all the intelligence gathered is available immediately to intelligence analysts, language analysts and cryptoanalysts in a central location without having to split that team."

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