Should You Have an App for That?

I talk to a lot of executives and clinicians about engaging and educating patients. They overwhelmingly want to know how to best reach today’s consumers with health information. As I talk about interactive, mobile messaging, a common question is, “Do you have an app for that?”

When thinking about using a downloadable app, the questions I always ask are: Will patients use it? Will it capture their attention and engage them to come back for more next week? Will it be easy for them? With 77% of Americans using smartphones, it’s important to understand how people use apps in their daily lives to understand their potential impact on patient engagement.

Thinking about implementing text (SMS) communications with your patients? Texting, the 160-character messages sent to and from a mobile device, is the most widely-used basic smartphone feature.

Since 2009, the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has acknowledged that texting is an easy way to share health messages with large populations.

But is it effective? Here are some surprising statistics about text messaging and its applicability in healthcare.

Hospital executives and patient educators often ask me how patients—particularly younger ones—like to communicate with their doctors nowadays in the age of millennials and apps.

Patients are people and we need to engage them as such. Regardless of age or other factors, they use email and text all the time in their daily lives and want to communicate with their doctors, hospitals and physician practices through those channels too. 

Reaching your patients through the technology they already use is key to patient engagement and activation

With new tools like Snapchat and Boomerang popping up every day, sometimes it seems like communication technology seems to change faster than we can keep up with. That has led some hospitals to rush into creating an app or join the latest social media platform. Others continue to lag behind, using paper and telephone as the primary communication methods used to engage patients.

But some hospitals recognize that patients want to communicate the way they do in daily life. Email and text have an important place in patient-provider communication and remain patients' top choices for connecting with their doctors outside the medical office or hospital walls.

In fact, when it comes to improving health outcomes, your best bet for communicating with patients is a combined approach: mobile-responsive email and text.