The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) is a global organization focused on improving health through information and technology. This five-day event showcases the latest advancements in healthcare IT, offering a unique blend of innovative ideas, expert insights, and the opportunity to connect with peers and industry leaders.

This year, Phunware will be among the leading innovators at HIMSS, showcasing how we’ve spent the past 15 years leveraging our extensive expertise in mobile applications to transform patient experiences for health systems like Phoenix Children’s and Greater Baltimore Medical Center. Our journey has equipped us with the insights necessary to develop industry-leading healthcare solutions, specifically designed to enhance patient care and streamline healthcare operations while saving costs.

Phunware is actively shaping the future of the patient-facing Digital Front Door by equipping Hospitals with the technology needed to unify the patient journey:

Holistic Integration: At Phunware, we understand that healthcare is more than just a service—it’s an ecosystem. Our platform extends beyond traditional tools, offering end-to-end solutions that encompass self-service EHR integrations, swift mobile check-ins, and seamless billing processes. We focus on ensuring every touchpoint contributes to a cohesive and efficient healthcare experience for both providers and patients.

Location Awareness: Navigating large healthcare facilities can be challenging for patients and visitors. Phunware’s real-time wayfinding and location services are designed to remove this friction, ensuring that patients, visitors and staff can easily find parking, locate their destination, and move through hospital campuses effortlessly. Our technology not only guides patients physically but also supports them throughout their healthcare journey.

Insightful Analytics: Data is at the heart of modern healthcare. Phunware’s advanced analytics tools offer a window into patient progress and behaviors, empowering healthcare teams to refine and personalize the patient experience, both on-campus and remotely. By harnessing the power of data, we help healthcare providers optimize operations and deliver more targeted, effective care.

As the healthcare industry moves towards more digital and patient-centered approaches, Phunware is your ideal partner in developing Digital Front Doors—virtual gateways that streamline access to healthcare services and information. In an era where every second counts, our solutions are designed to ensure that hospitals and healthcare facilities don’t just keep up, but lead the way in digital innovation.

We invite you to meet with us at HIMSS 2024 to discover how Phunware can transform your healthcare facility and elevate the patient experience. Don’t let your hospital fall behind in the digital revolution. Embrace change, drive better outcomes for patients, families, and staff, and set new standards in healthcare excellence.

Meet with us for a free consultation and see how we can make a difference together. See you at HIMSS 2024!

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The Hidden Cost of Lost Directions

It may surprise you to learn that wayfinding challenges are more than a minor inconvenience—they’re a costly affair. Take Emory University’s staggering $200,000 annual loss due to wayfinding inefficiencies as a wake-up call. The story is the same across medical campuses sprawling over city blocks—lost visitors, delayed care, and the inevitable financial leak.

A Labyrinth of Complexity

Imagine a vast complex with nearly 200 beds, multiple floors, and a constant state of flux due to renovations. Now consider that nearly one-third of first-time visitors and a quarter of hospital staff find themselves disoriented in these spaces. Traditional navigation aids falter here, where GPS signals can’t penetrate, and static signs become outdated overnight.

The Digital Compass: A Leap in Wayfinding

The answer to this disarray? A mobile wayfinding solution that offers real-time, on-demand digital navigation. Such technology not only alleviates the need for human direction but also curtails the margin for error, reduces patient and staff anxiety, and secures the revenue that would otherwise be lost to confusion, missed appointments and patients leaving without being seen.

The Phunware Difference

Not all digital navigation tools are created equal. Phunware stands apart, having deployed over 110 million square feet of cutting-edge wayfinding solutions across some of the world’s most complex environments. Phunware’s proprietary platform transitions seamlessly between indoor and outdoor environments and excels with real-time positioning, navigation, and multilingual, ADA-compliant guidance that doesn’t rely on WiFi, ensuring no one—regardless of their physical abilities—is left behind.

Charting a New Path in Healthcare

Phunware is not just navigating the present, but pioneering the future. We envision a world where wayfinding is no longer a source of stress but a gateway to efficient, cost-effective, and safer healthcare experiences. It’s time to transform the way we find our way in healthcare—turning a web of corridors into a clear, navigable path to wellness. Join us as we turn complexity into clarity, guiding you to better care, one tap at a time.

Click here to learn more

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At the forefront of this revolution is the Digital Patient Experience.

The importance of the digital patient experience cannot be overstated, as it plays a pivotal role in shaping patients’ perceptions and satisfaction with their care. Hence, investment in digital solutions is reportedly an essential action for improved healthcare experience.

After all, a positive patient experience can lead to increased satisfaction, improved treatment adherence, and even better health outcomes.

In this blog post, we’ll delve into the exciting world of digital healthcare, exploring how technology is shaping how we access and manage our health. From user-friendly healthcare apps and websites to the latest trends and innovations, and the challenges that come with this digital transformation – we’ll uncover everything including the building blocks of a successful digital patient experience.

Understanding the Digital Patient Experience

Digital Patient Experience (DPE) refers to the use of digital technology for patient engagement activities that take place both inside and outside the healthcare environment. Digital patient experience enhances the journey of a patient through a healthcare organization by making the process of receiving care easier and more efficient.

Unlike traditional healthcare interactions that often involve face-to-face consultations, paperwork, and manual processes, the digital patient experience leverages technology to improve accessibility, convenience, and efficiency in healthcare delivery. 

Benefits of a Positive Digital Patient Experience

The implementation of digital patient experience offers several advantages, not just for healthcare providers but also for patients. Some of the key benefits that come with a positive digital patient experience are:

Improved Patient Satisfaction

With the use of digital technology, patients have access to more personalized touch points with their care providers which leads to improved patient satisfaction and engagement. Patients can access their medical records, ask questions, view their results, and even book consultations with clinicians, all from their mobile devices. This promotes a higher level of engagement between patients and care providers leading to better health outcomes.

Enhanced Access to Healthcare Services

Digital technologies enable patients to access medical services, such as telehealth or virtual visits. This is helpful for patients who find it difficult to access healthcare services, such as aging adults or those living in rural areas.

Better Health Outcomes

Digital technologies enable effective monitoring of patient health records. This enhances diagnoses and empowers the healthcare organization to offer more personalized advice. 

Improved Operational Efficiency

With digital technologies, healthcare operational processes become faster and more efficient. From patient check-ins to storage of medical records, care providers can safely manage and store data in the cloud. Automation of healthcare processes such as scheduling, reminders, and follow-ups simplify operational processes, resulting in time-saving and fewer resource requirements.

Building Blocks of a Successful Digital Patient Experience

Patients today expect the same level of convenience and personalization from their healthcare providers as they do from other industries. Therefore, healthcare organizations must understand the core elements of a digital patient experience so they can meet patients’ expectations. The building blocks of a successful digital patient experience are:

Seamless Appointment Scheduling and Access

The first step towards creating a successful digital patient experience is to ensure that patients can easily book and access appointments. Utilizing online booking platforms and implementing virtual waiting rooms and telemedicine capabilities has been shown to increase convenience for both providers and patients thus, they should be a priority.

To further enhance the appointment scheduling and access process, healthcare providers can leverage the digital experience to guide patients throughout their journey, from booking to attending their physical appointments with instantaneous reminders, and GPS and on-site navigation to easily attend their appointments. 

Personalized Patient Portals

Empowering patients with access to their health records, customizable features, and patient-centric information is an integral part of digital patient experiences. Healthcare organizations should develop personalized patient portals with enhanced patient engagement capabilities.

Learn more about how Phunware’s tech delivers unmatched growth for healthcare organizations

Communication and Engagement Tools

Leveraging secure messaging and chatbots on the patient portals allows for effective. Patients can get quick responses to queries, and access interactive and educative resources. This will enable them to better understand their treatment plans and participate more in their care.

Integrating Wearable Devices and Remote Monitoring

Connecting patients’  wearables and implementing remote monitoring allow for real-time health tracking. Integrating devices such as smartwatches, and smart thermometers with patient portals will enable healthcare organizations to capture real-time patient wellness information and offer proactive healthcare interventions.

Designing User-Friendly Healthcare Apps and Websites

A fundamental part of making healthcare services better and more accessible is to ensure the digital patient experience delivers a good user experience (UX). Many factors contribute to good UX, including:

• Intuitive navigation with clear and concise instructions.
• Clear and organized information structure
• Visually appealing design

Responsive Design for Mobile Accessibility

Easy access to healthcare services on mobile platforms is now a necessity, and this is where responsive design comes into the picture. Responsive design helps healthcare platforms to adapt to different screen sizes, ensuring optimized features and usability across devices. It also entails designing healthcare platforms to be mobile-friendly, e.g., the use of large buttons for touching/tapping, optimizing image, scripts, and other resources to reduce load times.

Additionally, apps focused on monitoring and tracking health data need to provide reliable and secure data handling. This denotes the need for effective backend integration, security protocols, and testing approaches. 

Incorporating User Feedback and Iterative Improvements

To create functional healthcare apps and websites, it’s essential to collect patient feedback and iteratively use it to enhance the platform based on their needs. Some strategies for incorporating user feedback for improvement include

• Conducting usability tests with real users to identify pain points, areas for improvement, and opportunities for innovation.
• Providing accessible channels for users to share their feedback, such as surveys, contact forms, and social media.

Overcoming Challenges in Digital Patient Experience

As promising and transformative as the technologies propagating patient experience, some challenges must be addressed to fully realize the potential of the digital patient experience.

For example, ensuring the privacy and security of patient data is paramount as we transition to more digital technologies. Privacy and data security concerns can be addressed by implementing robust data security systems that comply with all applicable regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). 

Additionally, all digital solutions should be designed with explicit data and privacy settings that give patients control over their data.

Bridging the Digital Divide

Disparities in digital access and literacy can lead to unequal access to healthcare and digital services. This results in a digital divide between underserved and marginalized populations and the general population. Healthcare providers can ensure inclusivity by collaborating with local municipalities to create more affordable access to digital technologies.

Additionally, training programs that provide digital literacy and healthcare information to underserved populations can be an effective way to bridge the digital gap.

Overcoming Technological Barriers

Integrating legacy systems with new digital solutions can be a major hurdle for healthcare providers. It can also be challenging to train healthcare professionals to use new digital solutions and technologies. To overcome these barriers, healthcare providers should focus on creating strategic plans that incorporate digital transformation across multiple platforms. It’s also important to provide caregivers with adequate training and support. 

By leveraging the strengths of digital technologies and existing healthcare processes, providers can effectively mitigate any technological barriers and drive greater patient experience.  

Future Trends and Innovations

With revolutionary solutions reshaping how healthcare works, the digital patient experience is quickly becoming the new reality of healthcare. Digital advancements and innovations have enabled us to transform the traditional healthcare experience into something more personalized, accessible, and cost-efficient.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are beneficial for healthcare in terms of personalized and predictive patient care and diagnosis. This technology can be used to monitor patient health at scale, as well as provide personalized recommendations and support for patients based on their medical histories.

AI and ML can also be used to support treatments with evidence-based data, enabling doctors to make more informed decisions about patient diagnoses and recommendations. An example of this is the Canadian AI company Atomwise, which uses AI-supported technology to analyze medical records and predict potential targeted therapies for cancers. 

Virtual and augmented realities (VR and AR) are also transforming healthcare by providing patients with immersive experiences. Phunware is pioneering geolocation-based triggers that deliver timely directions and content to users as they enter and exit the healthcare facility. With AR, this could be further be applied to wayfinding or other onsite experiences.

Furthermore, medical professionals can provide training for healthcare staff using virtual simulations to mimic real-world scenarios. 

Blockchain technology, although still developing, allows for secure data exchange between providers. This enables patients to easily switch between providers without worrying about loss of data. 

Blockchain facilitates data interoperability which ensures that data is accessible across different platforms and sources. This allows healthcare providers to share information across organizations thus, empowering patients to access the best healthcare regardless of their location. An example of such technology is the US-based company MedicalChain, which uses blockchain technology to securely transfer medical records between providers, resulting in better care for patients. 

Conclusion

As we’ve explored throughout this blog post, the digital patient experience is undeniably a cornerstone of modern healthcare. It is transforming how patients access and manage their health, leading to numerous advantages and most importantly better overall health outcomes.

To create a successful digital patient experience, it’s crucial to focus on these essential elements:

• Developing user-friendly healthcare apps and websites
• Addressing challenges like privacy concerns, digital divide, and technological barriers
• Keeping up with future trends and innovations such as AI, VR, AR, and blockchain

Embracing these key components and prioritizing the patient experience will help ensure your healthcare organization remains competitive and can always meet the changing needs of patients.

If you’re new to patient experience or already have an existing patient experience system but looking to elevate how patients perceive the care they receive in your establishment, chat with us to see how you can improve the quality of service one digital interaction at a time.

We provide comprehensive digital solutions for healthcare organizations to enable them to deliver a satisfying experience for their patients.

Chat with us to know how you can improve your patient experience one digital interaction at a time!

The post Revolutionizing Healthcare: The Digital Patient Experience appeared first on Phunware.

Healthcare organizations providing a positive patient experience will gain a competitive advantage. According to Deloitte research, hospitals with improved patient experience perform better financially. The research also found that nurse-patient engagement – how nurses interface with patients, has a profound impact on providing better care.

Why does patient experience matter for both patients and healthcare providers?

For patients, a positive experience can lead to increased trust in their care team, better adherence to treatment plans, and improved well-being. On the other hand, healthcare providers benefit from higher patient satisfaction scores, stronger patient-provider relationships, increased patient retention, and ultimately, a more successful practice.

In this blog, we’ll delve into the world of patient experience, exploring its importance and strategies for enhancing patient experience. We’ll also cover how to evaluate patient experience systems and how you can overcome common challenges with patient experience.

Understanding Patient Experience

Patient experience encompasses all interactions that patients have with healthcare providers, from the moment they step into a facility to the follow-up care they receive after treatment. It goes beyond just the clinical aspects of care, taking into account factors such as communication, empathy, and the overall environment. The quality of these experiences can significantly impact patient satisfaction, health outcomes, and even the reputation of healthcare providers.

Patient experiences can be broken down into two main categories: physical and digital. Physical experiences are those that occur in person, such as the way patients are greeted and treated by the staff, the cleanliness and comfort of the facility, and the overall level of care they receive. Digital experiences are those that occur online or through mobile devices, such as the ability to access patient records, schedule appointments, and communicate with providers.

Both physical and digital experiences are important to patient satisfaction. According to this study on the impact of a hospital’s physical environment, the physical environment of a healthcare facility can reduce patient stress and improve outcomes. The study also reported an increase in staff effectiveness in delivering care.

The Impact of Positive Patient Experience

A positive patient experience has a tangible impact on various aspects of healthcare, which include:

Improved Patient Satisfaction

When patients have a positive experience, they are more likely to be satisfied with their care and remain loyal to the healthcare provider. This can lead to increased patient retention and referrals.

Better Health Outcomes

A positive patient experience can contribute to better health outcomes by fostering trust and open communication between patients and healthcare providers. This, in turn, encourages patients to follow treatment plans more closely, resulting in improved health outcomes.

According to recent results from The Beryl Insitute – Ipsos PX Pulse, half (51%) of Americans surveyed believes a good patient experience contributes to their healing.

Reduced Healthcare Costs

A positive patient experience enables healthcare providers to identify areas for improvement, streamline processes, and reduce inefficiencies. This can lead to lower operational costs, decreased readmission rates, and reduced costs for healthcare organizations.

Strategies for Enhancing Patient Experience

A creative strategy is crucial in ensuring a seamless, positive experience for patients. Let’s dive into the different approaches that can help improve patient experience

Communication

Effective communication is fundamental to a positive patient experience. You can improve communication and information sharing by

1. Encouraging open communication and active listening in interactions between healthcare providers and patients.
2. Providing clear and comprehensive information about diagnoses, treatment options, and potential side effects.
3. Leveraging tools like patient portals, secure messaging, and telehealth to facilitate communication and information sharing.

Empathy and Compassion

Creating an empathetic and compassionate environment is vital for fostering trust and satisfaction. You can do this by

1. Cultivating a compassionate healthcare environment that encourages staff to treat patients with kindness, respect, and understanding.
2. Offering workshops and training sessions to help carers develop and refine their empathetic communication skills.
3. Recognizing and responding to patients’ emotional concerns and providing appropriate support.

Accessibility and Convenience

Ensuring that care is accessible and convenient can greatly enhance the patient experience. You can create accessible healthcare by

1. Implementing efficient scheduling systems and minimizing wait times for appointments
2. Enhancing accessibility for diverse patient populations such as language translation services and accommodating patients with disabilities or special needs such as braille signage in high-traffic areas like entrances and waiting rooms.
3. Creating a comfortable, welcoming environment with amenities like ample seating, and clean and accessible restrooms.
4. Providing physical accessibility such as wheelchair-accessible ramps and elevators, and accessible parking. You can also provide patients with tools that guide them to the right physical spaces, such as maps and wayfinding signs.

Shared Decision-Making

Involving patients in their care can also lead to better outcomes and higher satisfaction. You can encourage shared decision-making through these methods:

1. Actively engaging patients in discussions about their treatment options and preferences.
2. Providing educational resources and tools to help patients make informed decisions.
3. Collaborating with patients to set realistic and achievable health goals.

Continuity of Care

Ensuring continuity of care is essential for a positive patient experience. You can deliver a seamless experience through:

1. Coordinated care across different facilities such as primary care providers, specialists, and other healthcare professionals.
2. Effective transitions through healthcare settings and proper care handoffs
3. Personalized care plans that address each patient’s unique needs and preferences.

Technology plays an instrumental role in enabling this continuity of care. Electronic health records (EHRs), telemedicine platforms, and mobile applications facilitate real-time information sharing between healthcare providers, reducing the chances of fragmented or uncoordinated care. Furthermore, these digital solutions enable remote monitoring and virtual consultations, making it easier for patients to stay connected with their healthcare team and receive ongoing support. 

Patient Feedback and Engagement

Actively involving patients in their care and seeking their feedback can lead to valuable insights and improvements. You can do this by

1. Collecting regular feedback through surveys, focus groups, or informal conversations.
2. Inviting patients to participate in committees or advisory councils focused on enhancing care and patient experience.
3. Leveraging patient support groups where patients share experiences and learn from one another.

Unlock the full potential of your healthcare facility with Phunware’s innovative patient experience solutions!

Overcoming Challenges in Improving Patient Experience

Improving patient experience involves coordinating various aspects of care delivery which can often come with many challenges. Some of the prominent challenges include:

Resource Constraints

Healthcare organizations are often under-resourced, which can make it challenging to provide a high-quality patient experience. One way to work within resource constraints is to focus on the most important areas for improvement. For example, if a hospital is short-staffed and wants to improve wait times in the emergency room they could leverage technology to automate manual tasks such as check-in or accessing medical records.

Resistance to Change

When healthcare providers try to improve the patient experience, they often have to manage staff who are reluctant to adapt to the new ways. You can address this resistance by involving staff members in the planning process. When staff feel like they have a say in how things will change, they are more likely to be supportive of the change.

Cultural and Language Barriers

Healthcare organizations often face some challenges when handling patients from different cultural backgrounds. You can overcome these cultural and language barriers by hiring interpreters. Additionally, you can train staff on cultural competency as this will help them to understand the different cultures of their patients.

Measuring and Evaluating Patient Experience

Evaluating patient experience is essential for identifying areas for improvement. It also helps to ensure that healthcare providers are meeting patients’ needs and expectations. By regularly assessing patient experience, organizations can make data-driven decisions, track progress, and show their commitment to providing high-quality care.

Common metrics such as patient safety, wait time, bedside manner, and patient satisfaction surveys are handy measurement tools to evaluate patients’ experiences. Additionally, you can use The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey to get a full picture of patients’ experiences if your healthcare organization is eligible to participate in the HCAHPS in the data collection and reporting involved.

Technology can also play an important role in capturing patient feedback. There are many technologies available today that you can use, such as patient portals, text messaging, and social media which often incorporate analytics that enable you to evaluate how patients are perceiving the care they receive from your facility.

You can use one or a combination of these tools to get feedback from patients and engage them in discussions about their experiences.

The data collected from patient experience surveys must be used toward improving healthcare over time. For example, if the data shows that patients are not satisfied with how their pain is managed, the healthcare organization can take steps to improve its pain management techniques.

Case Studies: Successful Patient Experience Initiatives

Virginia Hospital Center

An interesting case study of a successful patient experience initiative is how Virginia Hospital Center (VHC) improved its patient experience with a cohesive mobile app that focused on enhancing patients’ convenience and care.

VHC leveraged Phunware’s tech such as blue dot SDK, GPS, and more to provide patients, visitors, and staff with access to interactive maps that direct them to their location in real-time as well as enable patients to manage their appointments through remote telehealth.

Dignity Health

Another outstanding case study is how Dignity Health fulfilled the unique patient experience needs of its healthcare facilities across 39 sites.

Dignity Health leveraged Phunware’s tech to provide patients and visitors with solutions such as smooth routing throughout healthcare facilities across multiple floors. Patients can confidently navigate the facilities and access physicians and departments seamlessly.

The solution also benefited staff and administrators. They can further improve the patient experience with insights from the native analytics and business intelligence.

The Future of Patient Experience

The development and application of technology in healthcare is creating a new landscape for healthcare professionals. From increased access to medical data to sophisticated predictive analytics and artificial intelligence, these advancements enable healthcare organizations to prioritize improving the patient experience.

These technologies allow providers to shift from traditional, reactive care models to a proactive patient-centered model, with proactive health management, remote patient monitoring, and health notifications being just some of the applications.

Along with greater access to healthcare technologies, patient experience is also becoming an integral part of healthcare policy and reimbursement models. This shift from traditional cost-based reimbursements to value-based models will reward healthcare providers for delivering better patient outcomes. With patient experience becoming a factor for reimbursement, healthcare providers will be motivated to provide an improved service.

The integration of patient experience into healthcare policies is just the beginning of providing better care. Many healthcare organizations are exploring ways to use data to better understand patient needs and create tailored services. Additionally, with the rise of telemedicine, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and robotics, it is foreseeable that digital health will become an invaluable complement to care.

Finally, healthcare systems worldwide are beginning to embrace patient-centered wellness, providing access to mental health services, nutrition plans, and lifestyle coaching to keep their patients healthy, active, and thriving.  

Conclusion

The importance of patient experience is evident from its potential to deliver better health outcomes, improve patient satisfaction, and reduce healthcare costs. To maximize the potential of patient experience, healthcare organizations must utilize vital strategies like effective communication and information sharing, show empathy and compassion, provide convenient healthcare services, and many more.

It’s also essential to evaluate your patient experience strategies using different metrics to ensure effectiveness. 

By now, you know why healthcare organizations need to prioritize patient experience. This prioritization will enable them to provide better care throughout the patient journey, increase patient loyalty, and unlock internal efficiencies that save valuable time and money.

If you’re looking to empower patients and enhance the care your healthcare organization delivers, Phunware provides cutting-edge tech that boosts patient engagement and improves operational efficiency.

Contact Phunware to start revolutionizing your healthcare organization with innovative patient experience.

The post The Power of Patient Experience: Enhancing Care and Empowering Patients appeared first on Phunware.

“A comprehensive mobile strategy is paramount to efficiently and effectively managing the continuum of care, especially in a healthcare industry that is wrestling with challenges compounded by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic,” said Alan S. Knitowski, President, CEO and Co-Founder of Phunware. “We have invested more than $100 million in MaaS to give organizations like these a crucial competitive advantage when it comes to driving their digital transformation initiatives and ensuring they see a return on their healthcare investments and outcomes, in this case with children and their parents.”

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“MaaS provides our customers with a true digital front door for their patients and staffs, either end-to-end as a complete turn-key solution off-the-shelf, or as software components and tools that they can license, incorporate and build on their own through convenient and frictionless Github downloads and a comprehensive learning management system known as the Phunware Phenom Certified Developer Program,” said Alan S. Knitowski, President, CEO and Co-Founder of Phunware. “Missed appointments cost the US healthcare system more than $150 billion every year, so we’re extremely excited to enable such a prominent, globally recognized healthcare organization to better manage their patient and clinician experience across more than 14 million square feet of facilities spread over a 40 block downtown metropolitan area.”

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“We recently announced a collaboration debut between Phunware and Cisco Webex called the On My Way mobile app portfolio for South by Southwest (SXSW) attendees in March in conjunction with the Cisco Innovation Hub at Capital Factory, where I’ll be discussing three-dimensional cognitive workspaces,” said Randall Crowder, COO of Phunware. “The Meraki Marketplace will now provide Phunware an important channel to thousands of Cisco Meraki customers across more than 100 countries worldwide who need the very best LBS solutions for their network environments without the risk of deploying unproven technology.”

Read the full article from Proactive

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“Companies across every major industry are using technology to transform their businesses and this event acts as a global stage for the latest innovation across these industries,” said Alan S. Knitowski, President, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Phunware. “We’re excited to meet with innovators and thought leaders in healthcare and elsewhere to explore how Phunware’s MaaS platform and digital front door can better engage new and existing customers, all while driving profitable behavior.”

For additional information on the event, visit himssconference.org/. To register, visit here. To view the full HIMSS20 program, visit here.

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As we touched on in our previous blog, convenience is at the forefront of a consumer’s decision-making process. Scheduling, proximity and wait times all factor into what patients consider a convenient experience. On average today, a medical appointment takes about 2 hours with only 20 minutes being time spent with a doctor. This is understandably frustrating to patients and is not an effective use of time!

• 77% of patient comments about wait times are predominantly negative
• 20% of patients report they will switch providers if forced to wait too long

With more and more non-traditional methods becoming available, healthcare organizations are at a crossroads; either adopt these new methods or have disruptors take control of the industry. NRC Health reported that since 2006, retail clinics have grown by 500%, which means more than 30% of U.S. households are within a ten-minute drive. In addition, 30% of patients have come to rely on retail clinics for their primary care and 61% are comfortable with at-home testing options.

One way traditional healthcare organizations can improve convenience and combat the use of retail clinics is through telehealth. Telehealth offers many benefits including accessibility, efficiency and flexibility for both patients and staff. According to an Advisory Board report, 77% of consumers say they would consider seeing a provider virtually and 19% already have.

Some early adopters have already begUn implementing telehealth within their organizations. Bernard Tyson, CEO of Kaiser Permanente, reported that in 2016, 52% of patient visits were conducted through its telehealth platform. In the last 5 years, 80 specialties have been authorized to utilize a similar platform. Kaiser also recently saw success with a cardiac rehabilitation telehealth program with more than 87% of the patients completing the virtual care program.

• 75% of the virtual visits were for prescription medicine, pediatrics, dermatology, after-hours care or psychiatry
• 70% of the primary care visits were conducted with the patient’s primary care provider

With the added convenience of telehealth, patients are less likely to delay seeking medical care. One telehealth program in Houston reported a 6.7% reduction of unnecessary emergency department visits and a $2,468 cost savings for each emergency visit avoided.

Telehealth is not the only trend taking the Healthcare world by storm. Along with the immense growth of clinician-directed virtual health options, mobile devices have seen a tremendous rise in health-related and self-care apps. Consumers have never had more access to more fitness or wellbeing resources right at their fingertips, with over 100,000 health related apps available on the market. 

So, what are all the different ways that people are using them? mHealth apps serve as virtual diaries with which users can track everything from steps to individual meals, their exercise regimens, even sleep patterns as well as mindfulness. People are even able to monitor and track their health and manage chronic diseases and disorders.

How many of you know someone who tracks their daily activities with their phones or wearable accessories, or someone with diabetes who is able to track their blood glucose levels through an app? Never before have consumers been more empowered to take their everyday health into their own hands.

In 2017, mHealth captured $23 billion in revenues and was estimated to grow at a rate of 35% annually. Analysts from Goldman Sachs also estimate the potential overall savings from digital healthcare at $305 billion, with up to $200 billion coming from improvements in chronic disease management.

At the end of the day, the goal of any healthcare organization is to provide the highest quality of care, preferably preventative, to their patients in the most convenient way. As technology continues to evolve, transformation in health systems both at home and abroad will need to follow suit. As the challenges and needs evolve from country to country, healthcare organizations, professionals and patients must be willing to adapt as they adopt new technologies, learning and adjusting as they go.

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But what exactly is a digital front door? 

A digital front door is the healthcare organization’s reputation and presence across the web. This includes online reviews, social media, websites and much more. The digital front door will likely be the first interaction with a potential patient, which is why it is essential to treat them as consumers.

Prior to booking an appointment, patients typically conduct research and compare reviews. They not only expect their provider to have an online presence, but they also prefer one that incorporates digital tools throughout their healthcare journey. This begins with appointment scheduling and carries all the way through to accessing test results and ordering prescription refills. 

In a survey conducted by McKinsey & Company, a 70% of the survey respondents preferred digital solutions to standard over-the-phone and in-person solutions for many of their healthcare interactions, including searching for a doctor and paying bills. 

• 79% prefer a digital solution to pay bills
• 73% prefer a digital solution to search for a doctor
• 71% prefer a digital solution to order prescriptions and refills
• 69% prefer a digital solution to check their health information
• 58% prefer email, text or phone appointment reminders
• 53% prefer digital tools to access electronic healthcare records
• 50% prefer video or online doctors visits

When discussing digital tools for healthcare organizations, the importance of mobile is undeniable. According to Pew Research Center, 81% of Americans own a smartphone and a growing majority now use it as their primary means of online access. Even more importantly, for one-in-five Americans, their smartphone is their only means of online access, which underlies the importance of a mobile-friendly presence whether that be an online portal or mobile application.

As patients take control, convenience is the primary factor driving their consumer-centric decision making according to the 2019 Healthcare Consumer Trends Report from NRC Health. Convenience ranks above quality of care, brand reputation and doctor/nurse conduct. This preference has spurred the growth of retail clinics and digital health, including telehealth and mHealth. Today Patients have more options than ever before. 

Here are the benefits of a single digital front door:

• Healthcare organizations can engage with new and existing patients
• Patient experience and satisfaction is improved.
• Patients will have fewer missed appointments.
• Both providers and end users will experience the benefit of existing technology through integration, as well as the elimination of disconnected portals, tools and apps.
• A more streamlined and productive operational process of healthcare systems.
• Increased revenue.

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The post When Patients Become Consumers appeared first on Phunware.

But what about environments where people want to explore—such as resorts, casinos or theme parks? In these environments, mobile wayfinding really shines. It puts a personal explorer’s guide right in the user’s pocket, helping people discover new points of interest and make the most of their stay. And while enhancing the guest experience, mobile wayfinding can also help drive incremental on-property spend and improve guest services’ efficiency and performance.

5 Reasons Mobile Wayfinding Is a Smart Investment for Hospitality Brands

A recent article in Techzone360 describes how mobile and location technologies are powering the smart hotel of the future, yet the hospitality industry as a whole seems confused about how to start or where to go next. According to Econsultancy’s Digital Trends in the Travel and Hospitality Sectors, mobile experiences and analytics represent the top priority for tech investment in 2018. However, another survey—The 2018 Lodging Technology Study from Hospitality Technology—declares that just 26% of hoteliers plan to upgrade their guest-facing mobile apps in 2018, while 22% plan to add or upgrade location technology.

Confusion aside, mobile-first digital transformation is coming to the hospitality industry, and large properties stand to benefit significantly. Whether it’s added to an existing app or anchoring a new one, mobile wayfinding is a strategic way to gain quick advantages now, while building a scalable foundation for your mobile-first future.

Here are five reasons mobile wayfinding is ideal for large-property hospitality brands:

1. It personalizes the navigation experience. People carry their smartphones with them everywhere these days and they’re used to relying on mapping apps to navigate when traveling. Mobile wayfinding brings that convenience to app users when they’re on property, even indoors. Digital signage and paper maps just tell people where things are. Mobile wayfinding tells app users where they are in relation to every point of interest on your property and provides turn-by-turn navigation anywhere they want to go.
2. It streamlines the necessities for your guests. By helping app users find their rooms or parking spots quickly, you’re reducing frustration and speeding them towards the enjoyment (and hopefully spending) part of their stay.
3. It facilitates discovery. As users explore their interactive map of your property, they discover points of interest along the way and can quickly and easily tap or swipe to get more information. Push notifications also invite further exploration—for example, as an app user passes a particular shop or spa, a push notification could be triggered to entice or incentivize a visit. (Mobile engagement also opens up potential revenue-driving partnerships with retailers and food service concessionaires.)
   Learn more in this eBook: Mobile Marketing Automation: Why It Matters and How to Get Started

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4. It can be built on a scalable and flexible foundation. Because the most advanced mobile wayfinding works with a wide range of sensor and location technologies and at different levels of granularity, you can start with the most affordable approach and expand your investment and use cases over time. For example, you can lay a foundation with static wayfinding, enabled by GPS and your existing Wi-Fi infrastructure, then move to real-time “blue dot” wayfinding with more extensive beacon, vBLE and/or smart lighting implementations as your roadmap extends. Increasing beacon density enables greater precision and accuracy and, as you expand, also enables you to use those beacons to trigger more use cases. For example, increasing beacon density on a casino floor might enable app users to navigate directly to their favorite slot machines or tables, or enable a virtual treasure hunt experience for resort patrons with kids.)
5. It’s attractive to multiple target audiences.
   • For vacation travelers, mobile wayfinding offers an added convenience, intriguing technology and a more personalized experience.
   • For meeting planners, it’s a way to help attendees reach specific events and locations relaxed and on time, navigate complex floor plans and even attract conference partners by extending wayfinding to the booth level on a convention floor.
   • For large group travel, mobile wayfinding offers a way to keep large groups connected with tour leaders, find each other easily and navigate to specific meeting points and events with ease.
   • For online travel agents, it’s an added proof point that your property is staying on top of consumer technology trends and ensuring an ideal guest experience.

Use Cases for Enhancing the Guest Experience

With a personal explorer’s guide to your property, guests will be able to:

• Find their rooms quickly and with less frustration
• Discover new points of interest on every journey—including retail and food services, entertainment venues, rides and experiences, etc.
• Locate empty parking and find their cars later (with parking system integration)
• Take the fastest route to amenities and points of interest (especially useful when running late to a show, for example, or hurrying to get to a specific ride or spa appointment)
• Use location sharing to find friends and family anywhere on property or to locate the nearest staff member

Use Cases for Improving Operations and Driving Revenue

Mobile wayfinding isn’t just for guests. By adding wayfinding to employee mobile apps, you can empower even temporary staff to be more efficient and productive while gathering valuable contextual data about both employee movement and guest behavior on property.

With mobile wayfinding in guest and employee apps, your organization can:

• Integrate with RFID or use beacons to track luggage or cleaning carts and more
• Utilize location sharing between staff and supervisors to help optimize headcount at key locations and times
• Share staff member locations with guests to facilitate order delivery, first aid and general guest support
• Add analytics to track guest traffic patterns and help alleviate bottlenecks
• Integrate with your guest management platform to personalize staff touchpoints, push notifications and more
• Collect contextual data on app user behavior while on-property—where they go, where they don’t, frequency of visits, times of day, etc.—then integrate with your guest management platform to better inform your profiles.
• Improve productivity by optimizing employee routing for room service, food and drink order delivery and more.
• Partner with retail, food / drink, entertainment and other guest-service concessions for special location-triggered offers, etc.

Among hotel execs, managers and staff:

• 91% think it’s important to generate insights from guest data to improve the guest experience
• 86% agree that all hotel employees require mobile access to be most effective in their jobs

Source: The 2017 Smart Decision Guide® to Hotel Guest Experience Management

Choosing a Mobile Wayfinding Partner

Mobile changes fast. Even if you have a digital team that’s familiar with mobile strategy, they may not have the necessary skills or bandwidth to enable mobile wayfinding. That’s why it’s usually best to seek an experienced development partner with a licensable wayfinding solution.

If you need to build a new guest- or employee-facing mobile app, look for a provider with a complete, brandable solution and/or custom development program. If you’re just adding mobile wayfinding to an existing app, look for a provider that offers easily integrated mobile building blocks (known as SDKs, or software development kits) that enable indoor and outdoor mapping, routing, and blue-dot navigation and can be customized for your needs.

In addition, look for a mobile wayfinding partner with:

• The flexibility to use your choice of enabling technologies (or a combination), as mobile wayfinding can work with GPS, Wi-Fi, physical beacons, virtual beacons and even smart lighting
• A user-friendly interface that allows you to change maps and points of interest (POIs) easily
• A proven track record of success with mobile wayfinding (ask for case studies)
• Experience working in today’s sprawling hospitality and entertainment environments with super-high ceilings and tight corners, huge indoor / outdoor spaces and labyrinthine corridors
• A lifecycle approach to ensure your mobile presence is built for scalability, expanding use cases and interoperability with myriad mobile technologies

Phunware has been at the forefront of mobile wayfinding for years now, helping organizations across multiple verticals guide and delight app users with personal mapping and navigation tools. Our experience extends from luxury residential to retail and mixed-use properties, large entertainment venues, hospitality environments and more. To learn more about our approach, check out our wayfinding solution videos or download our Hospitality Solution Overview.

WATCH THE VIDEOS

The post Mobile Wayfinding: The Explorer’s Guide for Resorts, Casinos and Theme Parks appeared first on Phunware.

There’s another small-seeming mobile feature that is super helpful in multiple scenarios: location sharing. App giants like Google Maps, Snapchat, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger all allow users to share their location with one another—it’s a great way to coordinate with friends (and get advance notice when somebody is definitely going to be late for the movie).

If, like many retailers, stadiums, hospitals and other physical venues, you have an app for the on-site customer experience, consider adding location sharing capabilities to it. This seemingly small feature provides convenience and social connection by helping people find each other within your campus or facility. Here are some examples of how location sharing comes in handy—useful information if your organization is looking for new ways to enhance the customer experience.

5 Places Location Sharing Really Shines

1. Healthcare: Hospitals and Medical Centers

Patients can share their location with hospital staff so they’re easy to locate in appointment waiting areas or anywhere in the facility. Critical physicians and nursing staff can share their locations with administrators so they can be found in an emergency. Staff can even share their location with patients or colleagues when en route to bring extra blankets, medicines, etc.

2. Hospitality: Hotels, Casinos and Restaurants

Guests can share their location and order details with staff, ensuring seamless delivery. Staff members can respond with an order receipt and the delivery location.

3. Theme Parks and Large Entertainment Venues

Visitors can create location sharing groups with each other, making their friends and family easy to find, even in crowded conditions. In a first-aid or medical emergency scenario, visitors can share their locations with the appropriate staff, who can use navigation to reach them as quickly as possible. Other staff, such as lifeguards or ride attendants, can share their locations with managers, helping to ensure coverage at all times.

4. Retail

Store associates can share their location with app users so they’re easy to locate via in-app mapping and navigation. Alternately, shoppers can request customer service and share their location, enabling associates to navigate directly to them.

5. Airports

Families or groups traveling together can create location sharing groups to stay connected throughout the terminal before, between and after flights. Baggage-handling and flight prep staff can share their location with administrative staff to help orchestrate and coordinate flight transitions.

Adding Location Sharing to Your App

If you’re considering enabling use cases like the ones above, Phunware offers licensable location sharing functionality as part of our Location-Based Services platform module, which also powers indoor mapping and wayfinding. To learn more about the power of location-based technology, watch our webinar:

WATCH THE ON-DEMAND WEBINAR NOW

For more information about location sharing, download our Location Sharing feature sheet or reach out to me anytime. I love talking about new ways to make apps even more functional and valuable for businesses as well as people.

Download our eBook Location Technology 101 to learn more about the types of location technology and how they work together—so you can start envisioning the possibilities.

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The post “I’m Here. Where Are You?” How Location Sharing Comes in Handy appeared first on Phunware.

“Smart hospitals are those that optimize, redesign or build new clinical processes, management systems and potentially even infrastructure enabled by underlying digitized networking of interconnected assets to provide a valuable service or insight, which was not possible or available earlier to achieve better patient care, experience and operational efficiency.”
–Frost & Sullivan, Future of Smart Hospitals

Recently, Frost & Sullivan published research demonstrating how digital transformation in hospitals will be increasingly mobile-first. Mobile technology exists at the intersection of physical and digital, moving through hospital corridors with patients, visitors, caregivers and medical devices. In such a highly fluid and ever-changing environment, mobility unleashes greater flexibility, productivity and efficiency.

How Hospitals Can Build a Smarter Mobile Strategy

Digital transformation is rarely achieved in a single step. Hospitals can start moving toward a mobile-first future by addressing achievable wins today while laying a solid foundation and single point of integration for future use cases.

From a technology point of view, hospitals need an adaptable mobile platform that can work with a variety of hardware partners and configurations—especially those of their existing wireless infrastructure. A location-enabled hardware infrastructure (be it Wi-Fi, physical or virtual Bluetooth beacons or even cutting-edge smart LED lighting) is the key to being able to create contextually relevant mobile experiences and effective workflow optimizations.

Learn more by watching our on-demand webinar: Mobile at the Intersection of Hardware and Software.

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From a strategic perspective, a patient / visitor wayfinding app is the logical first use case for testing the power of location-enabled mobile engagement. Wayfinding issues are common to nearly all hospitals (who hasn’t been lost in a maze of corridors?), and a mobile app offers a relatively easy and ideal solution. As users begin interacting with the hospital’s mobile platform, they start to generate a wealth of contextual mobile data. This mobile data can be captured and analyzed to yield operational insights, such as where traffic patterns could be optimized and continuously improve the patient experience.

Want to know how wayfinding can benefit your facility? Download our eBook to learn about the importance of a smart and multi-formatted wayfinding solution.

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Expanding Use Cases and Value through the Mobile App Lifecycle

Moving through the mobile app lifecycle, we always come back to Phase 1: Strategy. The same mobile platform and location technologies that enable wayfinding can be leveraged for additional use cases. By building upon a scalable mobile platform, hospitals can start to expand mobile’s impact in multiple directions:

1. Patient / visitor engagement: Appointment reminders, parking service integrations, concierge services such as nearby hotel/restaurant information, etc.
2. Hospital process automation and workflow optimization: Express check-in, patient / physician dwell time reporting, automatic patient status updates, etc.
3. Equipment, personnel and asset tracking: Real-time location systems (RTLS)

Selecting the next use case(s) to implement will depend on each hospital’s unique goals, infrastructure, budget and timeline. With each new use case, more valuable contextual data can be harnessed to keep improving patient engagement as well as hospital operations. In this way, the mobile app lifecycle is like a spiral—expanding outward in opportunities as well as value over time.

Tomorrow’s Smart Hospital Starts Now

Frost & Sullivan’s report found that by 2025, hospitals worldwide are poised to spend billions on remote patient monitoring, patient flow solutions and mobile asset tracking. A robust mobile solution like we’ve outlined above could help trim that expense through efficiencies of scale and strategic leverage of the mobile app lifecycle—but only if savvy hospital decision-makers get started soon.

For more information about how mobile act as the hub of digital transformation in healthcare, come see us at HIMSS 2018! We’ll be on-site in the Intelligent Health Pavilion at booth #11657 and I’ll be giving a presentation at the Leadership theatre diving into details about building a mobile strategy on 3/6 at 12PM.

BOOK A MEETING

The post Tomorrow’s “Smart Hospital” Needs a Smarter Mobile Strategy Today appeared first on Phunware.

The latest cool tech making new experiences possible in the mobile space is virtual BLE beacon technology, which essentially “virtualizes” physical beacons. Mobile platforms like Phunware use beacons as sensors to trigger all kinds of cool mobile experiences—from providing indoor blue dot navigation to sending you a personalized push notification with 25% off those boots you’ve been wanting when you’re just outside the shoe department.

A virtual BLE beacon is essentially an imaginary beacon that can do the same job as a real one. From a tech standpoint, the virtual beacon works differently than the physical one. From the marketer or user perspective, they’re the same. They can both be used to trigger engaging mobile experiences and to gather location, time and other contextual data that marketers can use to understand and target their audiences.

To learn more, check out the eBook Location Technology 101.

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Virtual Beacon Systems Are Easier to Install, Maintain and Manage

Physical beacons are awesome. They’re small and affordable, and they can be placed discreetly in any number of locations in a given environment. But like any physical device, they have to be installed and maintained by a person. Someone has to put them in place, change the batteries and move them around when needed.

Because multiple virtual beacons are enabled by one piece of hardware, however, they require installing and maintaining far fewer devices. The vast majority of the management and maintenance happens through a simple software dashboard. That saves time and hassle.

Virtual Beacon Systems Are Incredibly Flexible

You may not be able to stick a physical beacon on an incredibly high ceiling, but you sure can slap a virtual beacon up there. They can be added easily to an existing Wi-Fi infrastructure or physical beacon implementation. You can even create a hybrid solution that combines physical and virtual beacons to help balance costs.

Making Location-Enabled Experiences More Attainable and More Awesome

Flexibility and easy management mean that virtual BLE beacons bring location-enabled experiences within reach of more organizations—and more people. These same qualities make it viable to install more virtual than physical beacons in any given space. As a result, you get much greater accuracy and performance. And thanks to machine learning in the software backbone, the more a virtual beacon system works, the smarter and more accurate it becomes.

It’s Exciting Here at the Tipping Point

When people first got smartphones, nobody really imagined all of the different ways we’d use them—and there are still possibilities to uncover. As technology matured, use cases grew exponentially, and suddenly we don’t know what we’d do without our smartphones.

Virtual BLE beacon technology is poised to be the innovation that makes location-enabled mobile experiences ubiquitous. But for the average Joes and Janes among us, it might be hard to imagine all the ways organizations can use vBLE technology. Let’s take a look.

• A hospital nurse administrator could monitor and track every piece of valuable patient-care equipment that moves around departments—IV pumps, patient beds and more—right from her phone. She could know exactly where Doctor Adebayo is and how many minutes it’s going to take for her to get from the patient floor to the ICU. She could get an instant alert that Mr. Davis has been in recovery by himself for too long, and speed an assistant to make sure he’s all right.
• A regional outdoor store manager could quickly and easily move beacons around to gather data on shopper dwell time near a new display. When a seasonal summer department goes up, store marketers could install virtual beacons in the area to trigger highly targeted “Happy Camper” messages to shoppers right when they peer into that cool new tent, and trigger the mobile app to change over to a camping theme throughout. In the stockroom, temporary employees could use mobile to guide their re-stocking efforts, getting turn-by-turn navigation through the store and precisely to the exact rack where that flannel shirt needs to hang.
• An airport could install a dense array of virtual beacons to collect highly granular traffic data in baggage claim areas, leveraging all of that information to understand passenger traffic patterns in detail before a planned remodel. During the holidays, the airport could expand its beacon system throughout the terminal, enabling multiple marketing partnerships with retail and food / beverage concessionaires—and delighting app-using passengers with seasonal savings, or even a holiday-themed app scavenger hunt to help keep weary traveling families entertained.

These ideas are only a jumping-off point. As mobile continues to evolve and mature, location-enabled experiences and use cases will continue to expand. Personally, I can’t wait.

If you’d like to learn more about how connected mobile experiences are going to transform operations, management and the customer experience across verticals, watch our on-demand webinar “Mobile at the Intersection of Hardware and Software.”

GET THE WEBINAR

The post The No-Geek-Speak Lowdown On Virtual Beacons appeared first on Phunware.

That’s why we recently conducted a national survey of daily smartphone and tablet users to find out what mobile means to them now and what they want from mobile in the future.

In the 2017 Mobile Future Survey, we learned that daily mobile users are more—and more deeply—intertwined with their devices, with 82% reporting that having their phones with them makes them feel “safe and secure.” Three out of five admitted feeling anxious without their devices. And a few even admitted checking their phone during sex!

But it’s no real surprise that users are device-obsessed—on a daily basis, it’s likely that you unlock your own phone to interact with it tens (if not hundreds) of times. That’s why we used this survey to dig deeper into the types of apps daily mobile users turn to most often, what drives downloads and the truth about app dormancy. We also investigated what mobile’s biggest fans want from their devices moving forward. And finally, we explored the types of personal information daily mobile users will share with brands and app developers—and why.

As our CEO Alan Knitowski put it, “This study proves that mobile is no longer simply about competitive differentiation—it’s about survival.” Want to learn more? Download the full survey report and keep an eye on our blog and social media profiles in the coming weeks for a series of infographics featuring data from this survey.

DOWNLOAD THE SURVEY REPORT

The post Data Download: Phunware’s 2017 Mobile Future Survey appeared first on Phunware.

Recently, I was privileged to co-host a webinar called Using New Mobile Technologies to Enhance Patient Experience alongside industry leaders from Mist Systems, Mission Health System, Houston Methodist and HIMSS Media. We talked about untapped potential in the healthcare industry, where it’s no secret that indoor location technology has not even scratched the surface of all of its potentially transformative use cases. Let’s explore what’s getting in the way, and what the solution hospitals really need actually looks like.

Location Tech in Healthcare: The Big Picture’s Been Just Out of Reach

There are so many tantalizing location tech use cases for the healthcare industry—wayfinding, condition monitoring, equipment and patient tracking, workflow optimization, appointment reminders, patient engagement and more. But a variety of factors have prevented hospitals from realizing the full benefits of this technology.

• Hardware limitations: Health systems have tried many different hardware approaches, but none have achieved widespread adoption. Wi-Fi-based systems don’t always deliver the necessary accuracy, physical beacons require installation and ongoing maintenance, and any wayfinding solution that doesn’t leverage Wi-Fi or low energy Bluetooth (BLE) requires purchasing and deploying additional tags.
• Software limitations: Many forward-thinking organizations have deployed point solutions for wayfinding and asset tracking, only to end up frustrated. These point solutions suffer from limited functionality, lack of interoperability (barriers to integration), hardware compatibility limitations and a slew of other issues.
• Budget limitations: Many health systems have large investments in technology infrastructure (Wi-Fi, BLE, etc.), only to find that each new use case requires bolting on yet another costly single-use solution. They need a flexible mobile solution that can work with multiple hardware providers, integrate with other software as necessary and provide a platform to support future, sometimes unforeseen, use cases.

The Solution? Bringing Hardware and Software Together on Mobile

For hospitals, a flexible, future-proof mobile solution requires a complex interplay of hardware, software and humans. The ideal solution consists of:

• A scalable front-end hardware stack capable of generating extremely accurate location data for equipment, patients and staff.
• A flexible software back end that can fuse location data from any hardware provider and render on the map for the app user.
• The ability to integrate with hospital systems such as appointment scheduling, EMR/EHR management and others to meet the full spectrum of patient, visitor and business needs.

Up to this point, it has been very difficult for hospitals to find a single solution that addresses all three legs of this proverbial stool. Thankfully, technology advancements like Mist’s virtual beacon solution, announced last year, are beginning to break the ice. (Disclaimer: both Phunware and Mist are Cisco partners. Bonus: integration with existing Cisco infrastructure is seamless.)

In the webinar I mentioned above, I got to talk with Houston Methodist and Mission Health about how they’re using location technology today and their vision for the future with virtual BLE. Download the recording to hear their stories and get a closer look at the details of Mist’s technology and the ways Phunware’s platform can make the most of it in the healthcare space.

DOWNLOAD THE WEBINAR RECORDING

If you are looking for a scalable mobile strategy for the patient-centered hospital of the future, check out this on-demand webinar to learn how to do it at your facility.

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The post Untapped Potential: Hardware / Software Solutions in Healthcare appeared first on Phunware.

Then there’s the beleaguered nursing and support staff, struggling to balance patient needs with physician requests. And of course, administration—the quiet heroes and heroines behind the scenes, keeping everything up and running.

There’s no discounting the importance of the patient experience to a hospital’s success. Luckily, one of the smartest ways to improve the patient experience also has a huge upside for staff and volunteers. Hospital mobile apps offer a number of advantages for the entire facility. Let’s take a closer look.

Learn more in our on-demand webinar: “Using New Technologies to Enhance Patient Satisfaction”

GET THE ON-DEMAND WEBINAR

Reduced strain on information desk and volunteers

With a branded hospital app, patients can have a wealth of important information, right in their pockets. App users can tap and swipe through physician and department directories, then tap to call directly. They can use built-in wayfinding to find their destinations easily. When patients and visitors are empowered to take care of their own needs, they require a lot less direct assistance—and they’re likely to be a lot less stressed.

Streamlined patient and visitor flow

With blue dot indoor navigation and turn-by-turn guidance, app users can confidently make their way through the halls to their destinations. This helps minimize congestion—particularly around decision-making points such as lobbies, elevators and junctions between multiple buildings or wings. Less congestion means staff members can be more efficient as they transport patients and needed equipment. (Plus, improved wayfinding means a corresponding reduction in the amount of directional questions staff must stop and answer in the midst of their other duties.)

Learn more in our eBook: “Found: A Flexible Solution for Hospital Wayfinding and Asset Tracking”

GET THE eBOOK

More efficient patient and visitor communications

Hospital mobile apps represent a powerful and easy-to-use messaging platform for administrative and marketing staff. Predefined notifications and alerts can be sent directly to the lock screen on each app user’s smartphone—and these notifications must be interacted with to be dismissed, helping to guarantee your message is received.

When combined with location-based technologies, the app-as-messaging-platform becomes even more powerful and efficient. For example, marketing can use a beacon-and-app system to send information about bouquet specials whenever an app user passes the hospital florist—or to remind users that the coffee shop is closing in five minutes. Through integrations with the hospital scheduling system, app-based messaging can also be used for appointment reminders that are impossible to ignore.

These types of messaging campaigns are easy to create and manage, using powerful back-end tools that break everything down into just a few clicks.

Fewer late and missed appointments

With personalized wayfinding, app users will find it much easier to make their appointments on time. Appointment reminders can help users confirm or reschedule with just a few taps. While some people will always run late or miss their appointments, hospital mobile apps help reduce the amount of schedule juggling that office staff has to do. And when patients arrive on time and more relaxed for their appointments, office staff is freer to focus on other mission-critical tasks.

Ultimately, a good hospital mobile app can have a positive ripple effect throughout the facility—from staff and volunteers to patients and visitors.

For tips on getting internal buy-in for your hospital app project, check out Chapter 4 of our Hospital App Launch Guide eBook. Staff and volunteers can be your biggest app evangelists, so it’s a smart idea to help them understand how your initiative will make their lives easier and better, even as it improves the patient experience.

Download the eBook

The post Help for the Helpers: How Hospital Mobile Apps Benefit Staff and Volunteers appeared first on Phunware.

Now for the not-so-good news: The same study shows that app abandonment rates are nearly 20% and have been in that ballpark for years. Two in ten users open an app once and then never again. So how do you aim for the high-usage end of the spectrum? How do you keep users coming back again and again?

Consumers expect apps to deliver more and more value over time. And smartphone capabilities just keep going up. This means that existing hospital mobile apps need to continue to evolve their feature sets to meet patient and consumer expectations. Luckily, upgrading your app with the latest mobile features is much easier than developing a new app from scratch—thanks to our friend, the SDK.

SDKs add advanced features to your app, PDQ.

“SDK” is short for “software development kit.” It refers to a set of pre-written code, documentation and programming tools that developers can use to create new software applications or enhancing existing apps. (And “PDQ” is short for “pretty darn quick,” if you didn’t already know.)

Phunware platform modules offers multiple mobile SDKs, and because they’re essentially plug-and-play, they save a lot of development time and hassle. Brands can use Phunware’s platform modules whether Phunware built their original app or not.

The following modules offer the most logical value for hospital apps:

Mapping, Navigation and Wayfinding for Hospital Apps

Turn your app into a personal digital guide from your patients’ home or office directly to your facility, to the closest parking lot, then through the corridors and right to their ultimate destination. Your facility map can even be customized with points of interest, such as your pharmacy, billing department or gift shop. Mapping, Navigation, and Wayfinding is the big kahuna for hospitals, as it alleviates one of patients’ top frustrations and dramatically improves the patient experience. See how Dignity Health is using a mobile solution to improve patient wayfinding and experience.

DOWNLOAD SNAPSHOT

Mobile Engagement for Hospital Apps

In a hospital app, this module is all about improving engagement to make patients and visitors feel more welcome and respected. By leveraging location triggers, your app can send specific messages and notifications to users—such as a welcome greeting when they enter the building, or information about the daily specials when they near the cafeteria. Our user-friendly console makes it easy for your patient services team to build out a messaging plan that makes sense for your patient population.

Analytics and Business Intelligence

Phunware’s analytics platform module helps you understand who’s using your app, which parts of your app they view most, how frequently they use your app and more. If you’re also using our wayfinding module, you can see specifics about how users move throughout your hospital—such as seeing the most popular POI and routes chosen. All of these insights can help you deliver more relevant content, understand your patients and visitors better and make more informed decisions.

As smartphones become smarter, the most successful mobile apps will continue to evolve to take advantage of their new capabilities. Advanced features serve as differentiators for your hospital, and also keep users coming back to your app for a more and more useful experience. Having a leading-edge mobile app helps position your hospital as an innovative organization that puts the patient experience first.

Want to learn more about using mobile to benefit both patients and your facility? Our eBook, Where Do We Go From Here?, covers all that and more.

DOWNLOAD THE eBOOK

The post New Features for Existing Hospital Apps: How to Stay Ahead of the Pack appeared first on Phunware.

Let’s review the content required for most hospital apps. Generally, this information is gathered by your facility’s marketing team and provided to your app development partner.

Who Are You? Informational Content

Fundamentally, your app needs to tell patients and visitors about your hospital, describe its specific departments and provide details about the physicians who work there. In Phunware’s apps for hospitals (the FrenchWay app for Dignity Health’s French Hospital Medical Center is pictured below), this content appears on the About screen and within department and physician directories.

About Screen

• Hospital photo and/or logo
• Short descriptor paragraph (should fit within one smartphone screen—you can probably edit down what is on your website)
• “Tap-to-call” link

Physician and Department Directories

• Images (if applicable)
• Brief descriptor
• Contact information

How Do I Get There? Directional Content

Your app will need to guide users around the hospital in the physical world. Maps and wayfinding assets are the most critical element—because accurate navigation is the most valuable feature in a hospital app.

Maps

• Comprehensive and up-to-date maps of each floor and building in the facility that show accurate hallway routes and doors to the rooms
• Text descriptors for each floor (optional)

Point-to-Point Navigation

• Site map showing all buildings and parking
• Building floor plans with halls and doorways accurately marked
• Details and descriptions about key points of interest (POIs)
  • Entrances
  • Departments
  • Pharmacy
  • Cafeteria(s)
  • Gift shop(s)
  • Public restrooms
  • Elevators and stairs
  • Ramps and other accessible features
  • On-site and off-site parking lots

See how Dignity Health is using a mobile solution to improve patient wayfinding and experience.
DOWNLOAD THE SNAPSHOT

What Can You Teach Me? Value-Added Content

Many hospitals choose to enhance their apps with health-related information that is relevant to the population they serve—think “Pregnancy Timeline” or “Tips for Managing Diabetes.” You can add links in some areas of your hospital app to drive users to content on your website. There are also several options for third-party content syndication.

How Can I Get Your App? Information for The Apple App Store and Google Play

Describing your app in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store is an important part of app launch. When a patient or visitor searches for your app, you will want it to be paired with a good description and some key screen shots to encourage downloads. Plus, app descriptions are now searchable, so you’ll want to utilize primary keywords for maximum visibility.

Apple App Store and Google Play content

• App Icon
• Title (your app name + your hospital name)
• Text description (use keywords)
• Screenshots

Content Is (Almost) Everything.

Complete, easy-to-understand content within your app will make it a valuable tool for your users and keep them coming back to it, making them more engaged and connected with your hospital. Now that Apple has made app content searchable in iOS 9, your app content serves a marketing role as well. Properly indexed for iOS 9 and with Google app indexing enabled, your app content can show up in search results. This means that you will want to keep your content as relevant, compelling and current as possible.

I hope this overview has been helpful. As you discuss the scope of your app project, your development partner is the true guru about asset needs, mapping formats, naming conventions and launch criteria. Go in with an open mind and a good checklist, and you will surely be successful!

Want to learn more? Our comprehensive hospital app launch guide tells you everything you need to know about content gathering—and a lot more!

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The post Launching your Hospital App: Finding Content Zen appeared first on Phunware.

As you’re looking for big and small ways to improve the hospital experience for patients and visitors, don’t overlook the power of a branded mobile app. Here are seven unexpected ways your facility can use an app to help patients and visitors feel more positive.

1. Solve two key problems: “I don’t know how to get there” and “I don’t know where to park.”

Sure, patients and visitors can enter the hospital address into the map/navigation app on their smartphones. But that only gets them to the general area. By incorporating navigation into your mobile app, you can guide patients and visitors on a direct path from their starting location to the most convenient parking lot and right into the correct entrance—smoothly, confidently and comfortably.

2. Reduce the confusion involved in getting around the hospital—and make it personal.

The same in-app navigation technology that guides patients to your door can also help them navigate through the hospital itself. Once the patient or visitor enters your hospital, the app view can shift to a map of your facility, with the familiar blue dot guiding the user directly to the appropriate office, clinic, waiting room or patient room. How much more comfortable would patients and visitors feel with turn-by-turn directions, as if a guiding friend were walking alongside them, making sure they arrived stress-free and on time?

This same navigation can help patients and visitors find your pharmacy or lab, if needed, or the gift shop, coffee shop, chapel, cafeteria…all without having to “bother” any of your staff. The app can stay current with any changes to the hospital environment, such as relocated offices, elevator repairs, remodeling detours, etc. And when it’s time to head out, your app can guide them back to the parking lot and to their next destinations.

Download our eBook to learn more about just how costly poor wayfinding can be for your facility and the best options for location-powered solutions in multiple formats.

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3. Let patients and visitors know that you care.

A personalized “Welcome!” message on a user’s smartphone lock screen. A simple reminder to fill any necessary prescriptions. A follow-up message, just to let a patient know you care about his or her continued well-being. With back-end integrations, you can even send automatic prescription or appointment reminders to help ensure compliance with treatment programs. These types of messages can be automated where appropriate, and seamlessly delivered via push notifications. Small touchpoints like this can make a real difference in how patients and visitors feel about your facility.

4. Provide valuable information for patients and visitors how, when, and where they want it.

At this point, most people have their smartphones with them wherever they go. With a branded mobile app, you can put important hospital- and health-related information right in people’s pockets. It’s no longer enough to have a website. According to the latest comScore report, mobile app usage has grown 99% in the past two years and Americans now spend more than two hours per day using smartphone apps. Millennials spend more than three hours a day.

5. Make waiting time more productive—or at least less boring.

By incorporating syndicated content into your app, you can give patients and visitors something helpful, interesting, and/or entertaining to do while waiting. Third-party providers offer health-related quizzes, videos, games, articles and more, and some of this content may even be free to use. That said, it’s important to make sure the content in your app is relevant for your patient population. If they’re going to use your app, they must feel that it’s worth their time and attention.

6. Help people connect more easily with hospital billing, physicians, scheduling, etc.

Your hospital app can provide patients and visitors a direct path to any point of contact. Built-in directories can be organized by department as well as alphabetically, with convenient “click to call” and/or “click to email” buttons. The fewer hassles people encounter as they engage with your facility, the calmer and more positive they will feel.

7. Learn more about your patients and visitors—and about their hospital experiences.

Standardized patient surveys are now coded into Medicare reimbursement law. But there’s a lot more we can learn from patients and visitors, especially if we think outside the box.

As hospital quality and safety advocate Leah Binder recently stated in The Wall Street Journal, “We are also seeing innovative ways to solicit patient feedback, such as cellphone surveys and social media. Hospitals and health plans are using this data systematically to track consumer comment as a way to gauge overall quality of care.” At least one hospital, Boston Children’s, has explored the use of Twitter data analysis to get a more timely handle on what patients think, feel and say about their hospital experiences. By incorporating a carefully designed patient survey form into your app, you can give patients a personalized platform to share their thoughts with you. Never underestimate the power of a listening ear.

In addition, an app can reveal interesting data about patient and visitor behavior. You can see how long people engage with your app, how many people engage with offers, which content they find most compelling, etc. With indoor wayfinding enabled, you can learn about how people move within your hospital. For example, understanding how long it takes for patients to progress along a certain route can help you uncover signage issues or other obstacles.

As you can see, a mobile app for your hospital is more than just a smartphone-optimized brochure. By leveraging the navigation and communication capabilities built into your patients’ smartphones, you can connect with them in unprecedented ways. You can use technology to make them feel more calm, respected and welcome.

To learn more unexpected ways a mobile app can improve hospital operations and the patient experience, download our eBook: The Way You Want: How Multi-Format Digital Wayfinding Empowers Patients and Visitors.

DOWNLOAD THE eBOOK

The post 7 New Ways to Make Patients Feel Calm, Respected and Welcome appeared first on Phunware.

Imagine you’re taking your elderly mom to the hospital for some tests. She’s anxious about the whole idea. She doesn’t feel great, and her mobility is limited. You’re worried because Mom’s worried, and also because it’s your responsibility to make sure she gets to her appointment safely and on time.

You can find the hospital, but then what? Where do you park? How can you figure out the closest parking lot to where Mom’s appointment is? You’re not going to the main building, so where’s the right entrance? Are you going to have to drive in circles to find a parking lot, then wander around trying to find the building entrance? Now you’re running a little late, and you can’t really hurry Mom—she’s doing the best she can with her cane—but you don’t want to drop her off on the curb alone while you park, either. Why does a simple trip to the hospital have to be such an ordeal?

I’m stressed out just writing that story, but it highlights a crucial and often-overlooked part of the patient journey.

Finding close parking and the right entrance is a big factor in how patients and visitors feel.

As customer service and patient experience consultant Micah Solomon wrote on the Forbes magazine blog, “The first and last moments of a customer interaction are what a customer is likely to hold in memory as the permanent “snapshot” that encompasses the whole event.”

Learn more in The Way You Want: how Multi-Format Digital Wayfinding Empowers Patients and Visitors.

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How’d We Get Here? Hospital Wayfinding (and Waylosing)

Hospital parking is increasingly challenged by urbanization. There’s simply less empty space available for parking expansions as hospitals grow. So the closest parking for a particular appointment might not be readily apparent to the arriving patient—it might be down the street and around the corner. Add in the fact that hospitals now offer many more services on an outpatient basis, and you’ve got a lot more people coming and going, needing to use whatever parking is available.

As hospitals expand and repurpose buildings, entrances shift around. Redesigns might move the front entrance of a building entirely. There may be multiple “front doors” to a building. Patients often just “pick a door, any door” and hope they can figure out where to go next.

This is precisely where a great hospital app can help.

With built-in navigation and wayfinding, patients can be personally guided to the closest parking lot for their appointments and—crucially—given a direct path from their cars, right to the most convenient entrance. Once they’re indoors, the blue dot navigation takes over and guides them on to their ultimate destinations.

So, in our example above, you can be guided at every turn, with personalized notifications to keep you on track. You don’t have to drive in circles—the navigation takes you directly to the closest parking lot without a worry. Then the app guides you and Mom on the shortest path to the correct entrance, alleviating all of that pressure and anxiety. You arrive on time for Mom’s appointment, both of you calm and able to focus on what the doctor has to say. That’s much better.

Parking lots and entrances can either be obstacles or welcome mats.

Space and budgets being what they are, most facilities can’t undertake a complete overhaul of their parking and entrances. By launching a hospital mobile app with wayfinding and navigation—or adding these capabilities to an existing app—any parking and entrance situation can be workable and less stressful for patients.

So, what now? Are your parking lots and entrances getting in the way? Where do we go from here? Download our eBook, Where Do We Go From Here, to learn how to reduce missed appointments and increase patient satisfaction.

DOWNLOAD THE eBOOK

The post Patient Experience: Are You Overlooking a Crucial Part of the Patient Journey? appeared first on Phunware.

Here’s a quick checklist of the groups and departments that are typically involved, along with their primary responsibilities:

Marketing

This team is primarily responsible for providing all content for your app to the app developers. (Also referred to as “assets,” the different pieces of content required for your app might include text, images, brand-approved colors, directory information, maps, etc.) Marketing will work with Patient Experience and your development team to define the user experience for your app. This team is also responsible for ensuring brand standards and promoting your new app, both internally and externally.

Patient Experience

This department—or those who fill this role—will be the voice of patients and visitors in the development process. As such, they will play a big part in defining the user experience for your app. Post-launch, Patient Experience is usually responsible for gathering ongoing feedback from patients and visitors.

Learn more in this on-demand webinar: Using New Technologies to Enhance Patient Satisfaction

WATCH THE ON-DEMAND WEBINAR

Volunteers

Because they are often the first people to meet and engage with patients and visitors, volunteers are critically important to the success of your app. It’ll be their job to share the app with patients and visitors, encourage downloads, answer questions and help get new users up to speed.

IT, Innovation Lab and/or Product Teams

If it involves technology in some way, you can bet the tech team is going to want to be involved. If you’re working with a third-party developer, most of the technical tasks are handled for you. But your technology teams may be needed to help coordinate any necessary integrations with existing systems (such as scheduling, etc.). You may also want their help to assist with QA and testing just before launch.

Facilities

If you have a hospital wayfinding app, you’ll need help from Facilities to confirm the content and provide ongoing updates about construction, facility closures, etc.

Learn more in this eBook: Your Hospital Wayfinding App Launch Guide: Everything You Need to Be Successful

DOWNLOAD THE eBOOK

Finance

Since you’re already in the development process, Finance should have already signed off on the project. However, the dev process may reveal more features your hospital would like to include before launch. In that case, you’ll need Finance to provide approvals and any additional funding required.

Development

Very few hospitals or hospital systems have the in-house resources to develop their own apps, so most likely you’ll be working with a third party like Phunware. Your development partner will be responsible for guiding you through the process, establishing a schedule and checkpoints along the way, developing your app to functional and brand standards, and helping you make the most of your app through launch day and beyond.

Your Hospital Wayfinding App Champion

Finally, every app launch team needs a champion—a point person who’s responsible for generating internal excitement about your app, keeping teams up-to-date, and tracking your progress. This person will be part cheerleader, part coach, part project manager, and all-important to your team.

Believe it or not, launching a mobile app for your hospital can be fun and exciting! With a little organization and the right development partner, you can sail smoothly through the process. Want to learn more about successfully launching an app for your hospital? Check out our Hospital App Launch eBook for tips on planning for launch day, marketing your app internally and externally, training staff and volunteers to use your app and more!

Download the App Launch eBook

The post Launching Your Hospital Wayfinding App: First, Build Your Team appeared first on Phunware.