Clickatell has been chosen by healthcare organizations Cell-Life, ComplyRx and the National Health Service to provide mobile services that deliver critical medical information to mobile phones.

Using SMS, the healthcare industry can reach more people in more places with critical healthcare information they need and seek. Clickatell's service will help these healthcare organizations provide customers with text message notifications, actionable text alerts, mobile media delivery, mobile application delivery and binary messaging.

"Simply put, Clickatell allows developers to have a leading mobile strategy and deliver it to their customers," said Reinhard Seidel, director of product marketing at Clickatell, Redwood City, CA. "In addition, developers want flexibility like choice of multiple APIs, support and quality of service.

"They also mandate high speed," he said. "Other providers accept payment via phone calls, credit cards and checks, resulting in weeks just to set up an account. Clickatell takes online payments, which means they can be up and running in one hour."

There are significant financial advantages available to healthcare companies who take use SMS over traditional methods of communications.

For example, having launched its service using Clickatell in 2006, the NHS is said to have seen a 60 percent cost savings and reached more than 90 percent of its intended audience, providing information they need to live healthier lives.

ComplyRx helps physicians and patients establish interactive, direct communications to promote medical compliance.

Working with Clickatell, the NHS's goal is to raise awareness around health issues such as diet, drugs and safe sex among the general public, with a specific focus on teen health.

To benefit from the NHS service, people text "stop smoking," for example, to receive relevant information about a specific health topic.

Given a teenager's need for immediacy and privacy when it comes to various health questions, this service is especially important for them to be able to receive trusted information to answer their questions around sex, pregnancy, drugs and other critical health issues.

Cell-Life is using SMS to disseminate educational material about HIV/AIDS management and prevention to South African citizens. Cell-Life also uses mobile phones to collect data about people with HIV/AIDS and support treatment of people with Anti-Retroviral Treatment.

"We've been providing mobile messages since 2000 [and] we've seen again and again that SMS is the most cost-effective and easiest way to get started implementing a mobile strategy," Mr. Seidel said. "We see that the tremendous growth in SMS traffic and individual uptake that we have seen in [the] EU, Asia and Africa for some years is now also happening in the U.S.

"Acceptance is rising and individual text messaging use is growing," he said. "We also see that the mobile Web is now becoming easier to use."