Last week, Gozio sponsored a webinar hosted by Patient Engagement HIT, Find Out What the Latest Data Says about Mobile Patient Engagement. The presentation was a chance to hear about the latest data on the role of mobile in healthcare and how to ensure that your health system can create a mobile strategy that will attract and engage as many people as possible.
A recent survey, commissioned by Gozio, showed that nine out of 10 healthcare executives believe a well-designed, patient-facing mobile app would help their organization achieve its digital strategy goals. However, just 22% have an app that is custom-built for their organization. Not surprisingly, many of the respondents had fewer than 10,000 downloads, and many others didn’t even track their mobile metrics.
The 272 healthcare executives who completed the survey aren’t alone in facing challenges when trying to deliver a premium mobile experience. Today, 83% of the more than 350,000 health-related mobile apps on the market get downloaded fewer than 5,000 times, according to IQVIA—a sign of their lack of perceived value for consumers.
Mobile engagement is part of a larger digital strategy, and it requires thoughtful planning and governance. In this post, we’ll focus on just a few, but for a more detailed overview, watch the webinar.
First and foremost, true mobile engagement is much bigger than just having a mobile presence. While having a mobile responsive website and mobile version of your patient portal are important, they can’t be your entire strategy. The same is true for offering individual features like bill pay or a labor and delivery app as one-off solutions that each need to be downloaded.
For the best experience that will appeal to the most people, all of these things—and more—need to be offered in a single mobile platform. That platform needs to use the native mobile experience to deliver a premium experience that can be location aware and use tools like voice and face recognition.
It’s also critical that as many features as possible be available without the need to authenticate into the app. Logging in is a barrier to adoption, as we’ve seen over the many years of trying to increase patient portal use. A low barrier to entry is as important as offering a broad variety of solutions that appeal to all healthcare consumers, not just known patients.
As you think about how to deliver the features, functions, and access consumers want, ask yourself these questions:
- Can anyone download your platform's mobile app and use its features to engage with your organization?
- Can they access features other than your portal without the need to use secure authentication?
- Does your mobile platform integrate with your existing digital health tools?
- Can you provide the features patients most want—and do you know what those features are?
- Are you able to support seamless access to services and smooth transitions from one point of the customer journey to another?
The best digital platforms create a true hand-holding experience that helps people easily navigate from the digital world to the real world.
By thinking about the patient journey and the overall experience and how it meets consumer expectations, health systems can deliver the kind of mobile experience that will help support larger digital and business goals like ongoing growth, reduction in call center volume, improving staff efficiency, etc.
For more suggestions on how to create a premium mobile engagement experience, watch the full webinar, Find Out What the Latest Data Says about Mobile Patient Engagement.
