5 Things from the Guide to Mobile Patient Engagement

Successful patient engagement is driven by culture, strategy, and technology. One key piece of the strategy and technology that often gets overlooked is mobile. In a new all-inclusive guide, we share everything you need to know about mobile patient engagement.

With mobile usage outpacing desktop, it’s time for a focus on mobile. Patients and healthcare executives know it. In fact, nine out of 10 healthcare executives believe that a robust patient-facing mobile app can help deliver on their digital strategy goals.

And it is certainly what patients want if the patient engagement stats in this blog post are anything to go by. Most telling are these three: 

1. Virtually all patients—93 percent to be exact—say that they expect healthcare organizations to use digital tools when interacting with them.
2. 90% of patients want to self-manage their healthcare leveraging technology, such as accessing medical information, refilling prescriptions and booking appointments online.
3. 90% of patients no longer feel obligated to stay with healthcare providers that don’t deliver an overall satisfactory digital experience.
   

So why do we say mobile engagement platform? Or mobile experience? Because  mobile engagement platform is more than a hospital app. There is a misconception that any mobile presence is a mobile platform, but nothing could be further from the truth. This myth is part of the reason so many mobile apps fail, and why some in healthcare are hesitant to try again. Consider this as the next key point in this overview:

There are over 350,000 healthcare apps in the app store but 84% of them have fewer than 5,000 downloads. 

Why? For three main reasons:

1. They don’t deliver the value consumers are looking for
2. The user experience is poor or shallow
3. It’s not integrated as part of the digital strategy
   

The best mobile engagement strategy begins with the right foundational framework. ​​Gozio CEO, Joshua Titus, presented a webinar for Modern Healthcare, Use an 80/20 Approach to Drive Mobile Patient Engagement Success. In it, he explained that health systems shouldn’t build a mobile solution from scratch. It's very time consuming and expensive, and the list of things you need to know and do to be successful is long. Instead, choose a partner who has already done this work and has a foundation you can easily build on.

You should then be able to easily plug in all your existing patient-facing digital solutions. At that point, launch with the core platform and 80% of the features in place. Focus your time on figuring out the 20% of features and tools that are unique to you. Then, work with your vendor to figure out how best to get those into the platform. The right foundation should be open to development as well as having a of existing off the shelf integrations. In the report, you'll find details on how to find those unique things.

True patient engagement with mobile goes far beyond an app for hospitals. It requires a thoughtful strategy that includes using your website and mobile platform in a cohesive way to place all digital tools into a single premium mobile experience. It requires the right technology, which is a foundational framework that ensures the platform can accommodate all the current tools, easily plug in new tools, and is open to customer development for those unique needs. And finally, it requires a culture that supports creating a single health system experience for all consumers that reflects their wants and needs.

To learn more, read the full report.