UK National Health mail system sends 250,000 texts per month

Link: E-Health Insider Primary Care :: NHSmail promotes free SMS for reminders

Contractors, Cable & Wireless’ head of frameworks, Ian Fowler, told E-Health Insider: ‘Since we launched the NHSmail service, we have seen the use of the SMS functionality grow. Currently we are seeing around 250,000 texts sent across the service per month, but we see the capabilities of this going much further.”

This is good news. The facility is available to any NHS doctor’s surgery — my only issue, I don’t know if the return-path for the messages is set. I think it’ll just be fire-and-forget. Ideally it would be useful if you could reply to your appointment reminder from your doctor — and for that reply to be delivered as an email into their inbox for action. I don’t think they do that yet. Anyway, brilliant to see the medium being used.