Experience of delivering laboratory reports as short message service to patients: A one-year experience

One of the common problems faced by patients in any government hospital is the fact that they do not get the results of the laboratory investigation ordered on them at the proper time. While the issues of quality control in laboratory have been adequately addressed by most of the hospital laboratories, the practice of issuing results to the patient in most hospitals is manual and this adds the element of human errors involved in retrieval and issue of the results to them. Hence an attempt was made to send the laboratory results as short message service (SMS) to the patients.

The project was started for haematology and biochemistry reports as they comprised most of the bulk of investigation ordered on patients. In-house modules were developed using MS Access for the data-entry of the haematology and biochemistry results. The results were then mapped to the patients' name and telephone. Services of an SMS gateway firm were used to then send the results to the patient in the form of SMS.

On an average 150 haematology and 250 biochemistry results are being sent daily to different patients. The cost of sending one SMS is approximately Rs. 0.10. This has resulted in a significant improvement of clientele satisfaction.

Sending laboratory reports as SMS to patients is an easy, efficient and economical way to reach out to the clientele and improve their satisfaction. The method can easily be duplicated in other hospitals also.