Mobile: Healthcare’s New Access-to-Care Differentiator

By Lee Jones

Improving access to care is a national priority—and for good reason. Access is directly tied to the foundations of healthcare’s quest for value: cost, outcomes and experience.

Notably, it is what consumers value most in evaluating their healthcare experience, according to a 2023 EY consumer health survey. Yet nearly half (42%) rate their access to care experience as below average. Findings from the survey of more than 6,000 consumers across the globe suggest that healthcare executives should respond by focusing on strategies that remove barriers and “deliver the hassle-free care models that consumers want.”

Improving this experience for people is achieved by keeping these five key takeaways in mind:

• It’s a business imperative. Improving access to care drives top line revenue and continuity of care for patients. It is win-win.
• Mobile engagement is critical. People do not want to sit at a computer, but they have their phone with them all day, every day.
• You need a unified experience. It can’t be partially on paper, on the web, and in email. Consumers expect a polished mobile experience.
• It needs to be end-to-end. People expect to be able to schedule and modify appointments, view receipts and records and communicate with your team.
• It has to be flexible. Point solution vendors come and go. You need a way to quickly and easily make changes to your vendor mix to stay relevant.

When it comes to easy and hassle-free access, there is an obvious contender for investment: mobile engagement. Experts predict mobile technologies will outpace desktop connections to businesses this year, with 56% of global internet traffic expected to originate from a handheld device. And given that as many as 96% of young adults and 61% of seniors own a smartphone, there is no denying the influence mobile will continue to have on consumer engagement for the foreseeable future, including in healthcare.

The opportunity to improve access to care via mobile is significant but only if consumer experiences meet expectations and drive adoption and reuse. Just as they do in other areas of life, consumers will seek cohesive digital experiences that consider the patient journey beyond the four walls of the health system along with personal preferences.

What healthcare consumers want from mobile

A recent survey found 50% of patients prefer to engage with their healthcare providers via a mobile platform. Across generations, there is a strong desire for a single healthcare platform to manage their healthcare needs, with five out of 10 preferring a single mobile app for this. That statistic reaches as high as 97% for Gen Zers and 94% for millennials.

Patient expectations for healthcare mobile experiences match the level of mobile service they receive from other industries such as retail and travel: a unified, dedicated hub that easily connects them to all aspects of their healthcare, from scheduling to billing to communicating directly with healthcare providers. Yet about 55% of hospital CIOs report they use 50 to 500+ software solutions to address operational needs, and the average hospital can have as many as six patient apps at one time. Ultimately, this scenario clutters up a patient’s phone and creates frustration.

The survey also found that consumers are looking for a wide variety of functionality within a unified mobile platform, such as the ability to view lab results, access patient records, schedule appointments, request prescription refills, complete registration and communicate with providers and other healthcare professionals.

Optimal mobile strategies in action

The goal of any mobile strategy is engagement—ensuring an app is designed to attract consumers and appeal to them so much that they will use it repeatedly. To get there, a health system’s mobile app must possess the functionality and services consumers seek in a single location. That is the biggest reason why stand-alone, single-function apps do not produce the intended ROI: They are too limited in scope and value. In contrast, health systems that brand a mobile app and include four or more key benefits within their mobile offerings are proven to drive user engagement repeatedly and at multiple points along the patient journey.

At the same time, it’s important for healthcare executives embarking on a mobile initiative to recognize that their initial mobile app offering will change and evolve over time. Consequently, it’s wise to choose a platform that allows functionality to be added or changed based on an organization’s goals and consumers’ desires and demands. This is an area where cloud capabilities can provide the needed foundation for adapting an organization’s mobile app strategy over time.

Healthcare mobile app success in action

UNC Health, an integrated health system owned by the state of North Carolina and based in Chapel Hill, adopted a unified mobile platform and then effectively evolved its mobile app over time—with notable success. Since 2019, the app has recorded nearly 400,000 downloads and a reuse rate of 82%.

When UNC Health first launched its consumer-facing mobile app in 2019, patients gained quick access to MyChart, physician directories, urgent care wait times and online appointments. The app also offered patented wayfinding with blue-dot navigation from home to parking to the point of care.

In 2021, UNC Health expanded its app to complement its urgent care services by adding the “Immediate Care Near You Map,” which, in addition to wait times, displays urgent care and emergency departments closest to the user’s location. The following year, UNC Health augmented the app to provide patients with enhanced wayfinding and appointment reminder features. Today, the health system has expanded its audience to incorporate a staff-exclusive digital experience, debuting this feature in 2023.

Baptist Health in Jacksonville, Fla., took a similar approach when it launched the Baptist Access mobile app in 2022. The primary driver was to create a unified experience that provided wayfinding navigation from a patient’s home to the health system parking lot to the point of care in addition to offering the ability to schedule appointments, view urgent care wait times, and deliver bill pay services, portal access and more. When the organization introduced its virtual assistant platform, Baptist Enterprise Linguistic Learning Environment (BELLE), IT leaders quickly realized that the best way to bring the program to life was through the Baptist Access mobile app. Having a customizable platform in place ensured the organization was able to achieve its goals.

To date, the Baptist Access app has been successful, with more than 1 million sessions and a 75% reuse rate. Since implementing BELLE, Baptist Health also has realized a significant boost in patient satisfaction rates and a drop in call wait times by more than three minutes, delivering nearly $1 million in savings to date.

Today, mobile strategies go hand-in-hand with patient access. With most consumers depending on the convenience of smartphones for so much, it is natural that healthcare preferences and satisfaction would morph in the same direction. Savvy health systems will design their mobile access strategy with streamlined access and a robust platform of services in mind.

Lee Jones is Chief Product Officer of Gozio Health.