Over the past two years, millions of people have interacted with their healthcare providers digitally for the first time: for example, the use of telemedicine has 38-fold increase since pre-pandemic. Today, many healthcare organizations recognize the potential of digital solutions such as mobile applications to improve care delivery and transform the patient experience.
But there’s a lot of open water between discovering potential and launching apps that actually make people’s lives better. The right key is to define how the application will impact business-level goals. Here are five steps to define your mobile healthcare app business goals.
1. Identify internal stakeholders
Mobile applications for patients affect many people: providers, front desk workers, IT teams, pharmacists, patients, and more. Which of these groups should be involved in defining business goals? Who is responsible for filtering input and making decisions?
Also, it’s important to determine if your organization has internal talent with the skills and bandwidth to build applications.
2. Define the purpose of the application
Once you know who will play a role in the business, it’s time to define the purpose of the application. These questions can help:
- What role will the application play in your business?
- Does the app digitally recreate the current experience?
- Will it add new experiences to keep you competitive?
- Will it bring a new concept to healthcare to disrupt the industry?
- Will it help you do better?
There is no “right” answer.
For example, the purpose of an IoT device connected to a wearable therapy device will be very different from that of a portal designed to facilitate doctor-patient communication. The idea is to consult with stakeholders and agree on how your application can have the greatest impact.
3. Talk to users
Skipping this step is one of the biggest mistakes a healthcare organization can make when launching a mobile application. Talking to end users (patients and doctors) is critical to validating (or invalidating) your assumptions about how to achieve the intended purpose of the application.
The downside of many unsuccessful healthcare applications is this “approach”. Patients may want a way to schedule appointments digitally, but if the app requires too many steps, patients are unlikely to actually use it.
In user research, the goal is to understand the actual problem of the user. From there, developers and designers can figure out how to solve these problems. You can do this by stress testing assumptions about what your application should do.
Talk to real people in the end-user group, learn about their lives and their concerns, show them models and prototypes, and integrate their feedback at each stage.
The result is an app that truly makes users’ lives better. As a result, adoption is high at launch.
4. Decide who will maintain the application
Just as an application without users doesn’t translate into business benefits, it doesn’t translate into business benefits without maintenance.
Applications need to be regularly updated, debugged, and improved to stay relevant and secure.
For many healthcare organizations, the key question is whether internal resources or agencies will do the job. If it’s an internal resource, it’s best to make sure they’re part of the application’s development so that they can transition into maintenance mode seamlessly and efficiently.
5. Define a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Once you’ve determined how your mobile app solves real user problems, it’s time to build and release the app. But instead of trying to build everything into the version you release, release a Minimum Viable Product or MVP — a minimal version that only meets user needs.
Why? Because this allows you to learn from actual user behavior. Building and launching a stripped-down version of your vision means you can instantly capture user data and apply it to future iterations.
If you ship too many features, there’s always a risk of spending time and money on things your users don’t need or want, things that don’t help you achieve your application’s business goals.
The expectation of any application is that you have to tweak and improve; launching an MVP helps minimize the rework you end up doing.
What’s good for the user is good for the bottom line
Without users, the only business impact of building an app is draining your budget. Linking the business goals of the mobile app to the needs of actual users solves the adoption problem from the start.
To that end, healthcare organizations can adopt a way of working that prioritizes user input throughout development and continues after launch.
Image credit: Venimo, Getty Images
