What features should a mobile app have for hospital, focusing on patient engagement?

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What features should a mobile app have for hospital, focusing on patient engagement?

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productmanager1644 · Answer 1 · 2021-03-17T02:15:28+0000

CLARIFY:
1. Is there a specific user group to focus on? Should I assume the end user is the patient? You choose.
2. Is there a specific type of patient care to focus on: ex. surgery recipients who require long term care, emergency room patients, quick check ups, etc.? You choose.
3. Does this mobile app exist (ex. MyChart is a common mobile app used by hospitals)? You choose.
4. Is there a specific region: US v. international? You choose. (I will focus on US.)
5. Is this app for a single hospital v. multiple? You choose. (I'd like to focus on a multi-hospital app.)
6. When you say "patient engagement", is there a specific area of focus to think about? You choose.
USER GROUP: I believe there are 4 user groups to think about. For this app, I'd like to focus on patients, as they are the largest group, and I believe a mobile app for them will help most with the patient engagement focus.
1. Hospital Workers: Hospital workers (doctors, nurses, etc.) to help with their day to day duties engaging with patients. There could also be non-medical workers engaging with patients too (secretaries for check in, patient aids, etc.).
2. Patients: Individuals who are sick / requiring hospital assistance.
3. Patient Care Givers: Patient care givers (family members, aids, etc.) who will be visiting patients / providing for them while they are sick
4. Drug Reps: Pharmaceutical companies who provide medications for patients. Often they sell drugs to the hospitals.
USER JOURNEY:
1. Patient gets sick or requires a check up.
2. Patient sets up appointment at hospital or calls an ambulance / goes to the hospital in an emergency situation.
3. Patient checks into hospital / provides insurance if available.
4. Patient waits to see a doctor.
5. Patient is sent to a room.
6. Patient meets with a doctor and / or nurse. Gets prescriptions if needed.
7. If needed, patient may go through surgery. (May have to do a follow up visit for surgery.)
8. Patient may need to stay over night(s) or leaves hospital.
9. Patient checks out. (Presuming here the patient does not die at the hospital, though this possibility is noted.)
10. Patient pays any bills.
11. Patient picks up any pharmeuticals as needed.
USER PAIN POINTS: Below are pain points associated with each step of the user journey.
1. No Appointments: Patients is unable to find an appointment for a long time.
2. Long Ambulance Wait: Patient has an emergency, but ambulance takes a long time to arrive.
3. Specialist Doctor Unavailable: Patient is unable to find an appointment with a specific doctor or a specialist. Patient may also require follow ups / scheduling could be difficult.
4. No Insurance: Patient does not have insurance / will face very high medical bills.
5. Long Wait: Patient is required to wait for a long time to see a doctor. Hospital or ER is busy.
6. Exposure to Others: Patient is very sick and requires isolation. May be exposed to other sick patients (ex. covid) in waiting room.
7. Difficult Surgery: Patient must undergo an invasive medical procedure. Especially if patient is weak / old, even simple surgeries can be life threatening.
8. Patient Lonely: Patient may get lonely / feel isolated if required to stay in hospital for a long time. Especially with covid, contact with others is very limited.
9. Bad Hospital Food: Patient is forced to eat bad hospital food during stay.
10. Expensive Bills: Patient must pay very expensive medical bills (regardless of insurance). Pharmaceuticals they need may also be very expensive.
11. Drug Availability: Patient may be required to use expensive prescription drugs that may be hard to find. Generic options may not be available. Drugs also could be cheaper but with frequent use needed, cost builds / availability is strained.

PRIORITIZE PAIN POINTS:

Pain Point	Impact to Patient
No Appointment	High
Long Ambulance Wait	Medium
Specialist Doctor Unavailable	High
No Insurance	Medium
Long Wait	Medium
Exposure to Others	High
Difficult Surgery	Medium
Patient Lonely	Low
Bad Hospital Food	Low
Expensive Bills	High
Drug Availability	Medium

LIST SOLUTIONS: I'd like to list a few feature solutions based on these pain points.
1. Online Calendar: Mobile app has a calendar of all doctor availability at a hospital. Patient can sort by doctor or specialty (ex. allergist) to help find an available appointment / make one.
2. Hospital Connections: Mobile app could pull data across multiple hospitals to help patient find an appointment for a specialist doctor. For example, if a patient cannot find appointments soon for Hospital A, they may find one at Hospital B.
3. 911 Button: Mobile App could have a 911 button that patient pushes to immediately send for an ambulance. Patient could have already provided demographic data to app, so 911 operators know who the patient is / their medical history.
4. Insurance Filter: Patient could see a list of insurances across hospitals and filter to determine where their insurance is taken. Patient could also see options for low cost hospitals if they do not have insurance.
5. ER Times: Patient could get real time updates with how full an ER is at a hospital. Patient would be able to see if Hospital A's ER is very full, perhaps it's better to try Hospital B even if it is slightly further.
6. Exposure Notifications: Mobile app could allow patient to input whether they have special considerations re. exposure to others. Mobile app could send notifications (ex. similar to covid exposure notifications) if they are in harms way.
7. Patient E-Card: If patient goes through surgery, mobile app could automatically send patient an e-card with get well messages.
8. Patient Entertainment: App could provide lists of entertainment (ex. TV shows, games, etc.) that patient could access at hospital if staying overnight.
9. Food Delivery: App could provide menu for hospital and nearby restaurants for food delivery if staying overnight. If patient has special allergies or dietary restrictions for surgery, patient could filter and see options that meet their needs.
10. Payment Plans: App could help patients with payment plans (ex. loans, split payments / installments, etc.) to help pay large medical expenses.
11. Generic Brands: App could provide patient a list of generic drug brands that match expensive options.

PRIORITIZE SOLUTIONS:

Solution	Impact to Patient Engagement	Cost
Online Calendar	High	Low
Hospital Connections	High	Low
911 Button	Medium	Low
Insurance Filter	High	Low
ER Times	High	Medium
Exposure Notification	Medium	Medium
Patient E Card	Low	Low
Patient Entertainment	Low	Low
Food Delivery	Low	Medium
Payment Plan	High	Low
Generic Brand	Medium	Low

CHOOSE FEATURES: Based on the prioritization, I'd select the following features for the MVP launch of a mobile app that pulls data across multiple hospitals.
1. Online Calendar: App has an online calendar that pulls data for individual hospitals and all available appointments. Patient can sort by doctor or specialty, location etc. and book appointments as needed.
2. Hospital Connections: App pulls data from all neighboring hospitals and makes note where hospitals may have partnerships with one another. For example, certain hospitals may multiple locations. Patient can also look for specialties across all hospitals to find a doctor that suits their needs. For example, a patient may filter for an allergist that specializes in food allergies and can pull a list of all allergists across multiple hospitals.
3. Insurance Filter: Patient can also see lists of hospitals and doctors and see where their insurance is taken / understand what the general cost of their visit would be. Patient also can filter for low cost options if they do not have insurance.
4. Payment Plan: Patient has the ability to pay for hospital visits (across any hospital) in this app - i.e. one spot to pay for all hospital bills. Patient sees options for special payment plans if their bills are large: ex. 2 installments, 10% discount, loan, credit, etc. (Would need to run risk assessments on patients potentially / their financial background. May want to add qualifying factors for payment plans or allow for only very simple payment plans of 3 installments at full price for example.)
METRICS:
1. # of patients who download app
2. # of patients who use app (login at least 1x / month)
3. % change in patient logins month to month
4. # or % of patients who book appointments
5. # or % of patients who make payment or use a payment plan
LIMITATIONS:
1. App likely skews towards younger demographic. Patient must have a smart phone / be tech savvy.
2. Patients with disabilities may not find app as useful - ex. blind patient. (Can build more inclusively to account for popular disabilities.)
3. Each hospital may have different booking systems, etc. May be difficult to source data from every single local hospital. Bigger chain hospitals may use similar technology - ex. MyChart.
4. Assumes we can build on Android and iOS.

Aditi Bhalla · Answer 2 · 2023-07-26T22:03:56+0000

Clarifying Questions

Are we considering only Patient as a user or we are looking towards other user as well? Patient
Are we looking to add features in the existing app or building a new app? Existing App
If there is an exisiting app, what are the available features in the app? Patient Profile, History of visits, Customer Care

I am considering the user as a Patient. We have an existing app with the Patient Profile, History of Visits and Customer Care features and looking to add more features for the patient Engagement

User Persona

Age: 30-50 years
Working Professional
Daily Life: Busy
Health : Regular Health Problems

Customer Needs

Easy to look up for all the Hospitals covered under the user's Insurance.
Easy to see the calender of all the doctors of all the eligible hospitals.
Can book an appointment with the preferred Doctor on one click through App.
Video Consultation.
Home Delivery of Medicine.
Easy Conversation with the Doctor regarding your health post-consultation.
Recommended Provider List

Priortized Needs

Customer Needs	Impact	Complexity
Easy to look up for all the Hospitals covered under the user's Insurance.	High	Medium
Easy to see the calender of all the doctors of all the eligible hospitals.	High	Medium
Can book an appointment with the preferred Doctor on one click through App.	High	Medium
Video Consultation.	High	Medium
Home Delivery of Medicine.	High	Medium
Easy Conversation with the Doctor regarding your health post-consultation.	High	Medium
Recommended Provider List	High	Medium

As every need is of High Impact and Medium Complexity, I would pick the below for now:

Easy to look up for all the Hospitals covered under the user's Insurance.
Easy to see the calender of all the doctors of all the eligible hospitals.
Can book an appointment with the preferred Doctor on one click through App.
Recommended Provider List

Solutions

Need	Solution
Easy to look up for all the Hospitals covered under the user's Insurance.	Providing a user with a list of available hospitals according to the Insurance.
Easy to see the calender of all the doctors of all the eligible hospitals.	Provision to pull all the Doctors Calender Information.
Can book an appointment with the preferred Doctor on one click through App.	Provision to book an appointment with the Doctor through the available slots in his calender.
Recommended Provider List	Show the users with the providers list based on the last visit history.

Priortized Solutions

Solution	Impact	Compexity	Dependency
Providing a user with a list of available hospitals according to the Insurance.	High	Medium	API Research
Provision to pull all the Doctors Calender Information.	High	High	API Research
Provision to book an appointment with the Doctor through the available slots in his calender.	High	High	Provision to pull all the Doctors Calender Information.
Show the users with the providers list based on the last visit history.	High	Medium	History of visits

Metrics

Growth in % of patient booking an appointment on monthly basis.

Growth in Average No. bookings per quarter.

Summarize

Goals	Easy to book an appointment with preferred provider.
Needs	Booking an appointment in fraction of minutes with preferred provider.
Solution	Providing a user with a list of available hospitals according to the Insurance. Provision to pull all the Doctors Calender Information. Provision to book an appointment with the Doctor through the available slots in his calender. Show the users with the providers list based on the last visit history.
Next Steps	Video Consultation. Home Delivery of Medicine. Easy Conversation with the Doctor regarding your health post-consultation.

Nicole2021 · Answer 3 · 2021-03-09T13:15:23+0000

Clarify

I'd like to clarify our geography of focus, as HC is different around the world. OK to specify the scope to US? [yes]
Can I assume we are Google ? [yes]
Within mobile, any specific platform we should focus on? [no]
Why is patient engagement important for the hospital? Is this related to customer satisfaction scores that hopsitals receive? [yes, we have found that engaged patients are satisfied patients]

Goals

Given that we know there is a tie between enagement and satisfaction ratings, I am going to focus on designing a product that will engage a patient in their interactions with a hospital, knowing that will lead to a satisfactory experience.

Users

Potential users include hospital staff, patients, and family/visitors of patients in the hospital. Given our focus is on patient engagement, I'd like to focus on patients themselves. Within patients there are sub-segments that we should consider further.

Outpatients
- Routine appointments to clinics
- Emergency room
Inpatients
- Critically ill / in ICU
- General ward

Given that inpatient stays at hospitals can span several days to weeks, I'd like to focus on inpatients, since there are many opportunities to engage the patient during the stay. Within inpatient, I will focus on general ward (lower acuity) patients since they will be more responsive and more able to enage with an app vs those that are critically ill.

Sound OK?

User journey

Patient, oftentimes elderly with co-morbidities, may end up in a hospital due to a slip and fall, chronic condition, or other accident
- PP: Not sure how long they will have to stay at the hospital
They eat/drink, sleep, and receive medication or therapy during their visit
- PP: May not know when the next meal will be served
- PP: May not be able to indicate preferences - eg. hate jello
- PP: May not be able to sleep due to noise in the hospital
- PP: May not know when the doctor will round
They may have visitors, watch TV, or read a book for entertainment
- PP: May not know the visiting hours in case asked by relatives
  PP: May not be able to adjust TV settings
- PP: May be bored of TV
Once their condition stabilizes, they are discharged to go home, often with specific instructions for follow up care or medication
- PP: May not understand the doctors instructions for discharge

Pain point rating

Length of stay unknown - Med
Meal timing unknown - Med
Meal preferences - Med
Ambient hospital noise - High
Doctor rounding timing - High
Visiting hours - Low
TV settings - Low
Bored - High
Not understand doctor - High

Recommendation to focus on pain points around noise and entertainment, as making the patients stay as comfortable as possible will enable engagment and satisfcation.

Solutions

white noise machine
- Impact: Med
- Effort: Low
- Overall: Nice to have
AI to cancel background noise
- Impact: High
- Effort: High
- Overall: Should have
entertainment hub - podcasts, link to web cams, you tube videos and music, jokes, photos from around the world, virtual poker, video games
- Impact: High
- Effort: High
- Overall: Must have

Of the solutions identified, I recommend developing an entertainment hub with links to content that will help occupy and engage hospital patients beyond what TV can provide. The hub can utlize google assets such as assistant for jokes, you tube for music andd video, images for inspiring photos that may provide an escape for patients. The app would enable customers to have these various entertainment options available in one place, as they may not realize that they currently exist seperately. In parallel, I would initiate research on an AI model to recognize hospial sounds like monitors beeping, people talking, and other common hospital sounds, and enable cancellation of these sounds in the patients room.

Key metrics:

Primary: DAU of app

Secondary

Actions taken, or page views for each feature in the app, hospital customer satisfaction ratings, user engagement in activated google properties post discharge

Summary

I idnetified different customer segments, narrowed to one. Identified a user journey and pain points for the patient. I rated the pain points, and focused on two given the impact on the patients stay. I brainstormed several solutions, rated them for impact, effort, and overall prioritized them to focus on one, and also identified a roadmap for ongoing improvements. Finally, I identified key success metrics.

nehagupta · Answer 4 · 2019-05-12T17:24:14+0000

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:-

OPD patients - patients who come for consultations but are not admitted.
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:-

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

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