Orange promises NHS savings with mobile Health Gateway

Orange Health Gateway provides modularised medical communications

Orange touts improved patient attendance with mibile messaging

Mobile operator Orange has launched the Orange Health Gateway to provide the UK healthcare market with an affordable mobile messaging service.

The modular service can provide appointment reminders, routine tests results, and medication updates.

For health organisations it can also deliver staff and incident emergency messages over mobile devices.

The web-based messaging gateway service is delivered through mobile health provider iPlato, whose platform is hosted on the N3 private WAN used by the NHS in the UK.

Orange said it expects to deliver £300m cost savings through deployment of the appointment reminders module alone, claiming it would reduce the number of wasted appointment slots by up to 38 per cent.

The Health Gateway service announcement follows the launch of Orange's smartnumbers in July, which provides patients and healthcare workers with instant access to the best person available to help with a call via dedicated service numbers.

The UK arms of Orange and T-Mobile merged to form Everything Everywhere on 1 July.