Having a mobile strategy is important to the success of a healthcare organization's overall digital strategy.
Yet, healthcare systems continue to struggle with how to streamline their digital presence and what role mobile plays, whether home-built or vendor-supplied.
At Becker's Hospital Review's 13th Annual Meeting, in an executive roundtable sponsored by Gozio Health, Lea Chatham, vice president of marketing for Gozio Health, discussed the role that mobile plays in digital strategy and shared insights into Gozio Health's approach to efficient, user-friendly mobile experiences.
Four key takeaways were:
1. Patients expect high-quality, consumer-grade experiences in healthcare. Patients have demonstrated through numerous studies that they want and expect high-quality customer experiences in healthcare, and they're willing to switch providers to get the experience they want — even if they think their individual provider is providing good care.
"If the customer service is bad, or the digital experience is bad, I might change providers, because the provider portion of the experience is small, comparatively, right?" Ms. Chatham said. "Patients spend almost 200 minutes of their time getting an appointment, getting to the appointment and all the things around the appointment, but only 15 minutes is with a provider."
2. Mobile is the key to improving patient engagement. In a recent Gozio Health survey, nine out of 10 healthcare executives said they believe a well-designed app would help their organization achieve its digital strategy goals, while addressing important business issues like staffing. For example, a well-designed app can answer common patient questions pre- or post-procedure and help patients with appointment setting and wayfinding so the patients don't need to call.
3. But don't build your own app from scratch. Good app development is hard and most health-related mobile apps fail because the features aren't compelling and the user experience is poor. "We've had conversations with organizations who said, 'Well, we've already built our mobile app and we had to hire 60 people, it's cost us $5 million and taken us three years,'" Ms. Chatham said. "It is really expensive and very complicated. What we recommend is always go with somebody who has already done all that work. Don't start from scratch."
4. There is a solution: select a mobile app partner and follow the 80-20 rule. Often, health systems wind up with multiple mobile apps that do different things. One attendee shared his experience with his organization's multiple patient-facing apps: "We expose all the fragmentation to the user."
Instead of building an app from scratch, "Let someone else build the foundational framework," Ms. Chatham said. Choose a partner with an existing, tested and proven framework that provides 80 percent of what's needed in an app. Then, add unique customizations — the other 20 percent — if needed. This can include unique user stories and other customer features.
Partnering with a mobile app partner with skilled developers means the navigation has already been figured out, along with dynamic data and content management and a host of other issues. There is no need to take the time and money to reinvent the wheel.
The 80 percent can include check-in, portal access, staff information, survey, bill pay, email and text appointment reminders and more. The 20 percent might include real-time news, reporting non-clinical issues, visitor management tools and more.
A single mobile app that provides features like wayfinding, appointment setting and other information is a critical part of digital patient engagement. Since people often spend far more time interacting with an organization's digital presence than they do at appointments, making that experience excellent has never been more important.