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Using Short Message (Sms) To Deliver Appointment Reminders And Reduce No-Show Rates: An Evidence-Based Practice Project, Fernando Serrano

Doctor of Nursing Practice Final Manuscripts

Background/Objectives: Missed appointments (MAs) are correlated with reduced treatment efficacy, increased financial burden on medical institutions, and early treatment terminations for therapy (DeFife, Conklin, Smith, & Poole, 2010). MAs occur for a variety of reasons including, but not limited to severity of illness, financial/geographic constraints, and forgetting the appointment (Filippidou, Lingwood, & Mirza, 2014). Appointment compliance within outpatient mental health clinics has a wide variance with some clinics reporting MAs ranging from 15% to 50% (Car, Gurol-Urganci, de Jongh, Vodopivec-Jamsek, & Atun, 2013).

With decreasing costs and a subsequent massive increase in mobile phone technology use by the general population, …