Healthcare is complex. And to add insult to injury, patients experience care, no matter how compassionate or coordinated, when you are sick or injured—when you are NOT on top of your proverbial game. You are often in no condition to manage the complexity ahead of you. Many are lucky to have a family member step in to help. Others are not so lucky. But one thing is certain—everyone benefits from a more streamlined process that is more empowering and easier to understand. And although mobile applications are not easy to develop, for a user, they have the power to help them navigate even small portions of the healthcare experience in a way that is more empowering and turned into bite-size chunks that can be experienced at the discretion of the user. A few years ago, the cost of mobile application development for healthcare appeared to vastly outweigh the perceived benefit; few hospitals were venturing their toes into the water of mobile and ROI was in strong demand by those who had not yet done so. Now we are at an exciting place in which healthcare organizations can create savings for the home institution’s bottom line while solving real-world front-of-house and back-of-house healthcare problems. And with each passing day, an ever-expanding variety of healthcare problems are being identified that can be solved with and for patients while bringing them closer to your organization’s care and brand. This post takes a broad high-level look at the types of functionality that hospitals are developing which meet these significant objectives. So let’s get down to it.
- Billing
The billing process can add insult to injury. Connecting a patient’s bill to Google Wallet or iPhone’s ApplePay could help hospitals improve resources while helping patients navigate a payment plan that makes sense for them.
- Condition Management
There are lots of options in this category that can empower patients while permitting them to take a stronger role in managing their own care—from post-discharge communication with patients to providing automated prescription reminders and interactive symptom trackers.
- Education
Education is a broad term and can cover a lot. But there are simple things that an app can offer that can make life simpler for everyone:
- Telling patients what to expect
- What to bring to the hospital for surgery
- How to work with hospital resources
What’s even better than delivering information is being able to deliver it at the exact moment that a patient needs it. Imagine what it can mean to tie in education or information at the exact moment it is needed. Geofencing and hooks into the medical records can tie education to the right time before an upcoming procedure, providing a whole world of possibilities that patients crave.
- Emergency Room (or Urgent Care) Wait Times
Perhaps the most common thing to be automated for patients, having real-time access to dynamically updated information is a boon for both patients and waiting rooms.
- Insurance
Insurance verification is a pain point for patients, especially if authorizations for specialty care are involved. They are often unclear as to who is responsible for obtaining the authorizations and where they are in space and time in the process.
- Itinerary
Cruise ships have been doing this for years. Wouldn’t it be great to know what is happening today?
- Medical Records
HIPAA and state-related legislation often make this reliant upon arcane processes, but patients want access to this information and it is up to hospitals to find ways to work with the regulations to help this happen.
- Medications
In recent dialogues with patient families, they vocalized a desire NOT to have to call and talk to anyone to get a refill of a prescription. Could this be handled completely online? Perhaps. But wait, there’s lots more to consider here, including tracking medication dosages or intervals, taking a photo of the pills so that you know which one is which, setting and receiving timely reminders to take your medications and more.
- Parking
What if you could reserve your parking spot before you came and simply scan your phone to use the spot upon arrival? The scan could trigger a message to the clinic that you’ve arrived and that you are simply parking the car.
- Physician List
Search physicians in the system by name, location or specialty, request appointments or contact physicians and more all in your mobile phone. How convenient, right?
- Scheduling
It’s not always 100 percent possible to book or reschedule your appointment within a large healthcare system, but it certainly would make sense to at least tie a scheduled appointment into a mobile app so it would automatically update patients with reminders as the dates approach.
- Test Results
Alerts for patients that their lab results are ready to be viewed is a highly prized feature.
- Wayfinding
Assist your visitors with navigating and parking, enable automatic check-in, push relevant location-based messaging (e.g. a patient that just requested wayfinding information about the cafeteria might be well-served by a well-timed update that they can get 15 percent off of a cup of coffee). And here’s a hot tip, enabling a wayfinding system within your institution permits you to do other cool things like track traffic flow of visitors at various locations which lets you perform back-of-house studies to improve and streamline operations.
At a recent conference, a marketing guru was heard saying, that no matter what, when you do something new … “you either win, or you learn.”
If you are developing or have developed a mobile app, please help the rest of us win AND learn in the comments below by sharing a bit about your experience.
By Deborah Braidic | Posted June 6, 2017
SHSMD Digital Engagement Taskforce Member
VP, Communications and Digital Strategy
Children's Hospital Los Angeles