NHS England has reported that the messaging through the NHS App has saved the health service approximately £1.1 million over the past financial year.
It said the figure for 2023-24 derives from avoiding the 5p cost of a text message.
Patients who switch on notifications will automatically have their messages sent through the app. Messaging services available depend on the user’s GP surgery or healthcare provider, and can include viewing messages from services, viewing responses from the GP practice, and viewing messages to a provider such as specialist doctors.
Savings to increase
Dr Vin Diwakar, national transformation director at NHS England, said: “When we talk about the benefits of the NHS App, we usually focus on patient convenience, or the admin time saved for frontline staff – but the NHS App is also saving the NHS significant amounts of money on text messages and postal stamps, and these savings will only get larger as more features are added to the app in the future.
“By encouraging more people to use the NHS App, with notifications switched on, we can really start to reduce the estimated £450 million per year that is currently spent on communicating with patients.”
The NHS App now has more than 34 million registered users, which is around three quarters of the adult population in England.
Since the beginning of this year, the average number of NHS App log-ins per weekday is nearly 1.2 million. Monthly log-ins rose by 69% in the last year from 18.7 million in March 2023 to 31.5 million in March 2024.
