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nhssimple supports health professionals to use Flo and is helping to build a community of people working in health and social care who can share knowledge and learning about the many different ways Flo can be used. Rolling out FloĮncouraging more areas of the NHS to use the Flo system is now the responsibility of nhssimple, a social enterprise. Results went on to be published in the BMJ and interest in Flo has grown ever since. The patients who used Flo also had high levels of patient satisfaction.
#Text messaging apps for hospitals trial#
The trial showed better and faster clinical results in managing people’s blood pressure compared to a group of patients who didn’t use Flo. The team worked closely with telecommunications partner Mediaburst Ltd to develop a simple system.Īn early clinical trial showed the impact using Flo had for patients with hypertension and chronic kidney disease. The system was developed by a team at NHS Stoke on Trent (now Stoke Clinical Commissioning Group) to encourage patients to stick to their treatment plans, particularly for long-term conditions such as diabetes or hypertension.

Clinicians are also able to view real time information about their patients at any time via a simple web interface. It enables much more detailed and regular monitoring of a person’s health condition than is possible if a patient just attends regular appointments. If the results are outside agreed limits, Flo will pass this information on to their clinician, while also suggesting that the patient makes an appointment or speak to someone on the phone. Flo then sends regular text messages to patients helping them to monitor their health, sharing any information sent back by the patient with the person managing their care.įor example, a patient with hypertension could be asked to check their own blood pressure each morning and then to text the results back to Flo. Clinicians (doctors or other health professionals such as nurses or community matrons) can adjust the settings on Flo for each patient, defining when messages should be sent, what information they are asking for and how the system should respond. The technology behind Flo is fairly straightforward. It is a text messaging system with a human touch, and has helped to transform the lives of thousands of patients since it was first introduced by a team at NHS Stoke on Trent in 2010. The Florence Simple Telehealth text messaging system, or ‘Flo’ for short, was named after Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing. Here we explain how Flo works and why it was developed. Since 2010 it has been used by more than 30,000 people in over 70 health and social care organisations in the UK. As our Flo: telehealth with a human touch film shows, Flo has had a huge impact on people’s lives, revolutionising the way patients manage their own health.

Flo is a text messaging system that sends patients reminders and health tips tailored to their individual needs.
