NHSmail Email-to-SMS Funding Ending in 2015

16 / 07 / 2014


As of the 31 March 2015, the responsibility of providing SMS services will “cease to be a central concern” according to the business case prepared by the Department of Health and NHS England  which covers its transition from the current NHSmail service to its replacement, NHSmail2. 
 
The Email-to-SMS service is popular with GPs and other NHS staff, and sites already have plans to implement the service within the next year on the basis that the central funding allocation is in place, so this change could derail their projects, forcing them to look at other avenues that provide the same or similar service.

As the Health and Social Care Information Centre have suggested, “it is right that local organisations are given the flexibility to choose systems that best suit local clinical and patient needs.”, and that the use of emails and apps could be a cheaper way to replace the use of the Email-to-SMS service.
Email is already prevalent within the NHS in both NHSmail and Exchange Server. With the email volume set to increase further as the use of SMS diminishes it becomes ever more important to address email management issues.

If NHS organisations want to focus on email as their standard medium of communication, adopting Mailsafe to help improve the site’s email management should be the next step because it offers Outlook Archiving, PST Discovery, can act as an ‘extension’ to a users’ mailbox keeping them below their NHSmail quota limit and it also offers a Web App, where all staff can access to their entire history of emails away from the office.

Mailsafe also removes the headache of migration; it can sweep up all emails into the archive allowing the smoother transition into a new email environment. All of these features combine into one robust email management suite which can act as a primary form of communication for any NHS site.