This article describes a simple telehealth application called Florence. Developed by the NHS as a simple telehealth application, Florence (or Flo for short) allows clinicians to engage patients with their own healthcare.

The process begins with a clinician signing a patient up to the programme, after which the patient may begin receiving regular information or prompting messages to remind them to take their medication, for example. However, the communication is two-way. The patient can send in readings – for example, blood pressure, weight or oxygen saturation – to a website that is monitored by a clinician at agreed intervals, say weekly. The article reports that this achieves faster health outcomes, better adherence to medication or other treatments, and increased productivity compared with normal care. Harnessing this SMS technology has yielded much better engagement between clinician and patient, too.