Question

What features should a Mobile App have for Hospital, Focusing on patient engagement?

Answer 1

Based on the information provided in the question, assuming that this is an app that is designed by the hospital that all existing patients can sign up for and use the App. I see three potential customer segments that would be interested in such an application.

Customers:

1. Patients suffering from chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart issues, or kidney ailments
2. Expecting mothers who can track their progress through pregnancy
3. Parents of infants and younger children

For this excercise, I choose to focus on the customer segment of patients suffering from chronic diseases.

Needs:

This customer segment has the following needs that could be met by the App:

1. Keeping track of medications consumed
2. Tracking diet and excercise espescially for patients with illnesses that have a strong corelation with healthier lifestyles
3. Communicating with physicians and nurses in a secure fashion
4. Scheduling and tracking appointments 
5. Tracking ER/Urgent care wait times and being able to identify the hospital branch with a smaller wait time
6. Getting lifestyle tips tailored to their health requirements to help patients manage their chronic condition better

Evaluation

Evaluating the different features based on:

1. Likely to drive Customer engangement 
2. Engineering effort

and classifying the impact as small (S), Medium (M), and Large (L)

Feature	Customer Engagement	Engineering Effort
Medication Tracking	L	L
Diet and Excercise	M	L
Communication with Physician	L	M
Scheduling and Tracking	L	S
Tracking wait times at Urgent Care	M	L
Lifestyle Tips	S	S

Summary 

Based on the evaluation I would recommend prioritizing Medication Tracking, Communication with Physician, and Scheduling the appointment features in the MVP version of the App to drive customer engagement.

 

Answer 2

As per my understanding, hospital is planning to develop a mobile app with the goal of patient engagement.

Customers of this app will be patients, doctors & nurses. But since the goal is patient engagement I am focuing on patient side needs.

Under patients there can be below types of personas:-

1. OPD patients - patients who come for consultations but are not admitted.
2. Patients which are admitted in the hospital for some surgery/accident and now post the operation/surgery are recovering.

As both personas will have different needs, I am focusing on only the OPD patients.

 

I feel an OPD patient goes through below hassle every time he is ill and decides to consult a doctor:-

1. Getting an appointment from a doctor as per his type of illness and as per his convenient slot.
2. Understanding the consultations charges & estimated wait time before hand so that he can plan his day.
3. Post consultations, how to get medicines quickly without going through long waiting queues.
4. Follow on checkups till the patient has fully recovered.
5. In case of some sudden issue related to the illness, how to contact the doctor.
6. In case of cronic illness, keeping track of your medicines & medical profile
7. Avoid losing the medical prescriptions for future reference

For the first version of the app as we need to test whether customers find it useful or not and whether docs / nurses are comfortable using the app. Thus only the most crucial customer use cases would be part of the first version.

 

To priortize the use cases I would try to undertand :- how important the use case is for the customer & for the solution how big is the tech effort.

 

Use case	Solution	How important to customer	Engineering Effort
Getting an appointment from a doctor as per his type of illness and as per his convenient slot.	Search the doctor & get appointment via app	Priority 1	L
Understanding the consultations charges & estimated wait time before hand so that he can plan his day.	Before booking the appointment you can check the charges & estimated wait time on the app	Priority 2	L
Follow on checkups till the patient has fully recovered	In case of nothing serious, you can send your reports to the doctor via the app for followup checkups instead of physically visiting the doc leading to time wastage. Docter can view the reports & reply back via app and in case of anything serious suggest an appointment.	Priority 1	M
In case of cronic illness, keeping track of your medicines & medical profile	All records present in digital form in the app	Priority 2	S
Avoid losing the medical prescriptions for future reference	All prescriptions present in digital form in the app with search facility.	Priority 2	M
Post consultations, how to get medicines quickly without going through long waiting queues	App has the option to buy medicines as per subscription & get them delivered to your home.	Priority 1	M

 

So for phase 1, I ll prioritze the priority 1 use cases.

Since the goal of the app was patient engagment, I would suggest below metrics should be tracked once the app is released:-

1. No. of downloads & sign ups per day
2. Weekly actives, 3 month actives
3. No of conversations between patients & doctors per day
4. No. of orders placed per day
5. No. of appointments booked/day

Comments

I think your metrics are not aligned with your goals. You are focusing on opd patients but they are folks who are not necessarily falling sick every week. You need to see how you can get patient satisfaction directly and indirectly for e.g. inapp survey for satisfaction with opd experience, app experience, conversion rate or percent use rate among opd patients.