Rescheduling Dental Care with GSM-Based Text Messages

Abstract

The Internet has opened new avenues for customer communication, even for public services. In this chapter, we propose a framework for an integrated electronic health platform. Most of the platform is still at the planning stage, but the first applications are already up and running, among them, dental-service appointment rescheduling. In this application, new patients to fill canceled dental-service appointments are searched from an existing waiting list using GSM SMS messages. The first few months of operation have already shown that the new application, in conjunction with other methods in use, could limit the share of time slots that dentist completely lose through cancellations to under 10% percent of all canceled times.We present and analyze the function of the SMS-message-based dental-service appointment-reservation system, which is being implemented in Lahti, Finland. This analysis contains a description of the system functions, as well as some assessment of the success from a service-provider and customer point of view.