Inhaler Reminders for Asthma & COPD Patients

Your GP Practice has invited you to receive text message reminders about taking your inhaler. 📲

This page summarises how the reminders will work, how your data will be used and how to stop receiving reminders if you wish.

What are the reminders? 👩‍⚕️ 👨🏾‍⚕️

Your GP Practice is offering adult patients with asthma and COPD free text message reminders to support them with taking their preventer inhaler every day.

Many patients find reminders helpful for remembering to take their inhaler as prescribed.

Your GP Practice has partnered with Accurx to offer this service to you. Accurx software is used by 98% of NHS GP practices for communicating with patients and hospitals.

If you're already receiving reminders, you can also opt out here.

Who are the reminders for? 👨‍🦰🧔🏽👩🏼👵🏼👨🏿

These reminders are aimed at adult patients taking preventer inhalers.

If you haven't been prescribed an inhaler or you only use a reliever inhaler, please don't register for these reminders.

What happens after I opt in? 📨

After you opt-in, you'll receive text message reminders about taking your inhaler for 3 months.

You can choose to stop receiving the reminders any time at the bottom of this page.

What will you do? 📱

You'll answer a few short surveys over the 3 months to measure the impact of the reminders.

At the beginning and end of the 3 months, you'll be asked to complete adherence and symptom control surveys so we can measure the effectiveness of the reminders.

During the 3 months, you'll also answer two short engagement surveys to see if you're finding the reminders useful.

Each survey takes less than 5 minutes to complete.

What are the surveys? 🏥

For patients with asthma, the symptom control survey will be the Asthma Control Test ("ACT"). For patients with COPD, the symptom control survey will be the COPD Assessment Test ("CAT").

The MARS-5 adherence survey will be the same for asthma and COPD patients.

The surveys are standard medical questionnaires and aren't tailored to the reminders.

How will your data be used? ✅

Accurx will be measuring the impact of the reminders to see how effective they are at improving your inhaler adherence.

Accurx will do this in two ways: (1) analysing the results of the adherence, symptom control and engagement surveys that you complete over the 3 months, and (2) comparing these survey results with prescription data from your medical records to see how the reminders may have affected your prescriptions.

This prescription data will include: type, name, dosage and quantity of prescribed medication; prescription issue date; prescription type (repeat, single issue); number of issues and number of issues authorised; course duration, and date of last asthma/COPD review.

Accurx will share the results with your GP Practice.

How is this secure? 🔐

Accurx is an NHS Digital approved supplier and carries ISO 27001, UK Government Cyber Essentials Plus and NHS Digital Data Security and Data Protection Toolkit certifications.

All data is treated in accordance with UK GDPR. All pilot data will be stored securely and only accessed by select approved members of the Accurx team. No identifiable data relating to you will ever be shared outside Accurx and your GP Practice.

You can learn more about Accurx and its security protections here.

You can stop receiving the reminders at any time.