From the moment a new patient searches for a doctor online, to the patient’s discharge from your hospital, to the follow-up visits and ambulatory care, your health care brand can engage that patient on mobile. Today, 64 percent of U.S. adults own a smartphone. Patients are increasingly smartphone-dependent, especially among minorities and lower-income demographics.
Different patient groups have different mobile needs. Besides, patient journeys consist of multiple mobile moments, such as:
- Looking up the closest urgent care within networks:
- Getting GPS directions, wayfinding tips and ER wait times;
- Obtaining a referral to a specialist;
- Requesting an appointment and adding it to calendar;
- Adding a journal entry or a medication reminder; and
- Checking symptoms, etc.
All these mobile moments can, and should, be captured by your healthcare brand via useful mobile information and tools served at exactly the right time. Diluted, cluttered “one-app-to-rule-them-all” simply does not work in today’s customer-driven healthcare market. That means, it’s time for an agile multi-app strategy for patient-centered care.
The challenge of hospital marketers and IT departments is where to find the time and money to build all these apps? Mobile app development is expensive and time-consuming, and providers’ IT departments are already too slammed to keep churning out mobile apps at a rapid pace, as ideas flow in.
Providers can no longer afford to embark on long-term application development projects, with multi-step planning and approval processes, only to find that the resulting app does not meet the patients’ expectations, or generates poor ROI.
Typically, the marketing team is the main generator of patient app ideas. The usual scenario is to engage an outsourced development team for their mobile app project. When the budget is spent and the app is finally in the app stores, user reviews start pouring in. This feature needs modification! That bug needs fixing! Major changes to the user interface are required! Additional budget is allocated to address these issues. Then the new version of iOS comes out. Can you still track down that iOS developer who built the first version?
With a code-free mobile app development platform (MADP), all these issues are easily solved. Today, healthcare providers are taking control of their mobile app strategies by adopting an agile, rapid-fire, multi-app approach responsive to the demands of the marketplace.
MADP enables your organization to quickly launch multiple apps without stressing your resources. Your IT leaders and in-house developers can start focusing on really complex tasks, while your graphic designers and marketing administrators completely take care of the 80 percent of patient-facing and internal apps.
The key benefits of the MADP approach are:
- Faster time-to-market for multiple patient-facing and physician-facing apps;
- Greater creative input from marketing, clinical and administrative roles;
- Less day-to-day reliance on IT staff; and
- Flexible, cost-efficient testing, change management, and maintenance of apps.
Brilliant app ideas can emerge in all parts of your organization. For one of our clients, the idea for a Fibroid Center app came from a physician, who reached out to the marketing department to initiate the project. The first version of the app was completed in days using the MobileSmith Platform. The health system is now charting an ambitious multi-app strategy for patient engagement.
To learn how to build an agile, sustainable multi-app strategy for your healthcare system, get our new eBook:
MobileSmith is an enterprise-class mobile app development platform that enables organizations to rapidly create, deploy, and manage custom, 100% native apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android smartphones without writing a line of code.
