Healthcare
NHS Ambulance Saves 4,000+ Clinical Hours in 6 Months with Smart Messaging
BT and Soprano partner to power two-way messaging solution that prevents unnecessary ambulance call outs.
South East Coast Ambulance Service (SECAmb) is an NHS Ambulance Services Trust in the UK that provides emergency and non-emergency services to approximately 4.5 million people.
Covering Kent, Sussex and Surrey, SECAmb delivers 999 emergency response and 111 support services, connecting patients to urgent care, including ambulance transport to hospital when required.
SECAmb’s call handlers make rapid decisions every day, dispatching ambulances based on the information they receive during 999 calls.
But emergencies are often fluid situations with changing circumstances. In many cases, while ambulance crews were rushing to incidents, friends or relatives had arrived first and driven the patient to hospital unaware that an ambulance was already on its way.
Without a simple way for patients to provide updates after the call ended, crews frequently continued responding to situations that no longer required their attendance, reducing availability for other critical incidents.
BT and Soprano partnered to design a two-way messaging solution that enabled SECAmb to improve patient-operator communication during emergency incidents.
By integrating with the BT Smart Messaging platform powered by Soprano, SECAmb was able to connect messaging directly into its Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system. This provided both inbound and outbound SMS functionality, allowing patients to confirm whether they still required assistance or cancel an ambulance if their circumstances changed.
What started as a communication improvement quickly became a measurable operational shift across SECAmb’s emergency response services.
In the last 6 months (at the time of writing), SECAmb has seen significant operational improvements through the deployment of the smart messaging solution. Almost 350,000 delivered welfare messages have resulted in over 12,000 ambulance callouts being cancelled which has saved the NHS trust approximately 4,000 hours of clinical time and delivered almost £60,000 in cost savings.
Crucially, the system has operated exactly as required in a mission-critical healthcare environment — with no outages, no downtime and no issues.
Some of the key challenges that BT and Soprano have helped us overcome is the ability for patients to continue to keep us updated whilst they’re awaiting assistance from us in our services providing emergency and urgent care.
– Harry Kirkby, Head of Critical Systems, South East Coast Ambulance Service
Our SMS integration into the Smart Messaging platform has run flawlessly. No outages, no downtime, no issues and in the last 6 months we’ve been able to save 4,000 hours of clinical time.
– Kieran Campbell, Clinical Lead for Integrated Care, South East Coast Ambulance Service
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