By Abs Girdhar
As a healthcare provider, offering your patients the best care for their physical needs is undoubtedly important, but why should it stop there? Especially with the continued shift towards a “there’s an app for that” mentality, and that 70% of traffic comes from mobile, having an app is an easy way to go above and beyond the expectations of your customers as well as can help improve patient experience, manage workflow and drive revenue.
Staying par with the cutting-edge technology, and inculcating innovation in your business products and services can significantly push your business to a new level, helping you deliver the best, and improve customers’ engagement. With the advent of new technologies, businesses are aiming to provide flawless services to the customers, while solving their queries instantly on the go. Even the healthcare industry is keenly adopting advanced technologies to become more efficient, and convenient, like never-before. Medical professionals are going mobile to easily connect with their patients, and provide relevant information about their diseases, treatments, lab test reports, and everything else, encouraging them to live a healthy lifestyle.
These new capabilities backed with modernization are profoundly changing the approach of healthcare by moving from inbound patients to inbound data. As a result, this shift has impacted the traditional healthcare system, thus allowing medical professionals to access a pool of information about patients and their health, and deliver them the best results within their limited budget.
Here, are four ways how mobile apps will transform healthcare industry:
Better customer service – In this digital era, a healthcare app can simplify the daily activities to a greater extent, as well as prominently reduce the hospitalizations and emergency room visits, by smoothening the processes and improving communication between nurses, doctors, and others. Moreover, the app can also provide a number of benefits to the patients, such as ease of making appointment using an online booking feature, check-in facility, access to billing history, and payment via secure mobile payment gateways. Through the healthcare app, patients can also post ratings, and reviews about the hospital or doctor they have visited.
Patient retention – A healthcare app can prove to be beneficial in delivering enhanced user experience, and maintaining patient’s retention. With a healthcare app, patients can not only cut-down the expenses spent on postcards and letters, but can also save on the pockets by utilizing loyalty card programs run by the hospitals or private clinics. Integrating loyalty card programs in the healthcare apps is best for medical practitioners as it can help them earn trust and loyalty of the patients, thereby converting them into potential customers.
Manage workflow – Well, one of the major benefits of having a mobile app for healthcare practice is ease of work. With a mobile app, doctors and other medical professionals can not only manage their workflow, but can also utilize it for various other purposes, like reminding patients about their upcoming appointments, sending push notifications to patients about last minute availability, and communicating with clients through simple Q&A’s. In addition, the healthcare app can also assist medical professionals in solving their patients and clients queries, from anywhere and at any point in time.
Attract new customers – Basically, an app provides multiple features to the users right at their fingertips that helps them reduce manual effort and time. And, it goes the same with a healthcare app. Through a healthcare app, patients can have direct access to information about the practice, such as hours of operation, location, and much more. Doctors, and other medical professionals can also make use of healthcare apps to attract new customers and generate a large portion of revenue through it. Besides this, adding additional features like a 360 virtual reality tour of the practice can improve the functionality of the app, thereby providing a clear view of the office to the patients in the virtual world.
Although the healthcare industry still has major room for growth in the app world, it’s never been a better time for practitioners to get involved as patients will expect a way to easily book appointments as well as the option to get medical assistance on the go. All of these modifications will help engage individuals with their health and take healthcare services to the new heights.
Abs Girdhar is CEO of Appy Pie, a leading DIY app building platform.
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