It gives rise to the need for building a mobile health app for your hospital. There are already 3.18 lakhs of mobile health apps (or mHealth apps) available in all significant app stores with its market expected to reach 132.2 Billion in 2023.
mHealth apps help you in connecting with doctors virtually and prescribing medicines without having to physically reach the hospital.
Advantages of building a mobile app for your hospital
1. Hassle-free Online booking
Building a hospital’s app will help patients to easily book their appointment with the doctors. The app can bifurcate appointment booking procedure into multiple departments or based on the availability of the doctors.
Every doctor will examine a fixed number of patients every day and slots will close down as the count reaches the limit.
Whereas in the offline method, there is always confusion about the status of the doctor. Launching a mobile app will immensely reduce the burden on the receptionists and allow them to focus their time on other productive works.
2. Improved efficiency
In a mobile app, all the information is systematically placed which allows doctors to easily analyze the patient’s health conditions.
Not only this, the apps must contain a user id which is a compilation of all the lab tests, prescriptions, detailed info about the disease, doctor’s emergency number, and many more to help patients in case of emergency.
This makes a synchronized relation between the doctor and the patient. You can also build a dedicated mobile app only for the hospital’s staff to ensure proper communication. It should contain a texting feature so that the nurses are not wasting time looking for doctors. The app can also include an unavailability list so that all the staff is aware of each other’s timings.
3. Better audience reach
Developing a health app is the best way to attract audiences from regions who don’t even know your hospital or the services you provide. A mobile app can be downloaded by anyone and if it provides quality features to the user, there are high chances that they might physically want to visit your hospital.
People living in remote areas find it very difficult to reach hospitals for their routine check-ups but the hospital’s app can offer them a smooth video calling experience with the doctor, avoiding unnecessary travelling. Small features like this can make a lot of difference and attract a wider audience towards your hospital.
4. Handy Bill payments
Waiting in long queues just to pay bills is a tedious task both for the patient and the office staff. It becomes difficult for big hospitals to manually keep track of all payments without doing an error.
The bill payments structure has evolved and it now requires a lot of documentation, including health insurance or any previous benefits bagged from the hospital is necessary to be mentioned in payment forms. Maintaining all this paperwork is very time-consuming.
When developing a mobile app, you can ask the developer to integrate a smooth channel for the timely payment of bills. It will release pressure on the finance handling staff and allow them into other essential tasks.
5. All-time support
A mobile app allows patients to be connected with the hospital 24*7 and ask for help whenever required. It must contain multiple functionalities that allow patients to book appointments, see doctor’s schedule, bill payment, video calling with doctors, emergency call, and many more.
Consider having a combination of both free and paid version inside the app so that your hospital benefits with the revenue generated.
Your aim should be to simplify each process for the patient even before physically visiting the hospital. The easier your app is for the public, the more interaction you will receive.
6. Keep track of your patient’s health
Your health app should contain a patient column where they can log in with the user id provided by the hospital. It will give them a brief about their health condition and mention daily tips to improve it.
The doctors can keep track of their patients whether they are following all the directions or not. You can integrate specific alert alarms when the patient misses their medicine time or a check-up video call with the doctor.
These things show that hospitals care about the patients’ health and aim to provide faster recovery. This, in turn, increases customer loyalty.
7. Self-promote your hospital
If you provide some extraordinary features like the ones mentioned above, there is no way that your patient won’t be happy with your services. They will speak good things about your hospital and improve its brand value in the market.
Customers’ testimonials are the best way to gain trust in the audience. Your app should contain a column where the patients can give their valuable feedback. It will help you identify any shortcomings and give you a direction where people are facing problems. Genuine, constructive comments are as important as any good feedback.
8. Educate people to reduce unnecessary pressure on the hospital
A hospital is a very crowded place but is mostly filled with hyper-active patients who reach the hospital now and then due to a lack of minimum education about their health.
Your health app can mention some common diseases with their symptoms so that a person can understand whether to reach the hospital or not.
It will eventually reduce pressure on the hospitals and allow doctors to focus on patients that require immediate medical assistance. You should keep updating your app to educate more and more people about multiple health problems.
Case Study of some successful Mobile Health apps in the market
1. Aetna, iTriage
iTriage is launched by Aetna – a health insurance company. It helps patients find detailed information about their health conditions and therefore gives them a step-by-step guide on how they can treat it efficiently. iTriage identifies health complications at an early age and tells when to visit a doctor.
2. Cerner, CareAware Connect
It is an application that allows proper communication between clinical staff and ensures that all the relevant information reaches the right person in the shortest time.
The device contains multiple functionalities like staff assignment, on-call schedules, nurse calls, automated health records, secure messaging, and voice communication.
The website claims that CareAware Connect reduced nurse walking steps by 50%, hence allowing them to take better care of the patients rather than running to find the doctor.
3. Patients Safe, Patient Touch System
Patient Safe helps clinical staff to enable smooth communication between their team members. It allows patients’ information to be sent to the doctor through the texting platform. Along with this, there are various features like SMS paging, nurse alerts, voice calls, and lab results.
For enterprises, it becomes easy to transfer roles and integrate user information with Active Directory (AD).
4. Epocrates
Epocrates is a great application for the normal public to get clinical support and maintain a strong virtual relation with physicians. It provides detailed information about most of the diseases along with some instant treatments you can give to the patient.
The application also offers a list of alternative medicine a patient can intake in the unavailability of the prescribed one. Epocrates has been used by over a million people and all its content is made by experts.
5. Isabel
Isabel is mostly used by doctors to match symptoms with diseases. The website claims to provide 96% of accurate matching and contains information about 4000 causative drugs and over 6000 diseases.
Isabel is continuously updated to include the latest diseases, which will help doctors get the perfect match.
Conclusion
Mobile health or mHealth apps have become very popular among people as everyone has now started to recognize the importance of keeping themselves healthy.
So, having an app allows you to adopt new technology that will result in reducing unnecessary crowds and enhance your hospital’s efficiency, management, workflow, as well as customer loyalty.
Contact the App-Scoop Vancouver Mobile App Developers for further details.
