I agree that the costs are silly for SMS. It's one of the reason's I'm sparing with it & people who try to have a conversation with me via SMS drive me nuts. I'll usually just call them.
At the moment the practice has trialled calling patients to remind them. They haven't been doing that for long, but they suspect that it hasn't improved the patient no-show situation much. I guess that if they can get a plan where SMS costs 10-15c per message, sending the messages isn't tedious & time consuming and they see a decent attendance increase it might be worthwhile. Neil ----- Original Message ----- From: Horst Herb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: General Practice Computing Group Talk <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, November 24, 2006 3:04:02 PM GMT+1000 Australia/Sydney Subject: Re: [GPCG_TALK] SMS reminders and privacy concerns? On Friday 24 November 2006 14:48, Hugh Nelson wrote: > I think that the Medical Record needs to document that the patient > consents to SMS messaging. > We obviously need to have that in the data structure in future. What a blessing that there is such poor mobile coverage in my area - hardly any patient uses SMS (which is ridiculously expensive btw for the few bytes that get transferred in a fraction of a second!!!) In general, I think it is up to the patient to decide how far or how little they want to risk their privacy. If patients want me to send their results via unencrypted email - so be it. If they want to access their health records via web browser - same thing. All they need is to understand the possible implications, and I discuss this with them in detail. Only constraint is that anything that needlessly compromises privacy by current technical standards should be strictly OPT IN. I would see it as far more important to protect *misuse* of private data - eg telemarketers straight to jail if they dare to molest me without explicit consent or at least without respecting a national "do not molest" list. Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
