Unified Patient Experience App

For most patients the hospital begins with a phone call and a hope that the doctor is in. We moved that first contact onto the patient's own phone.

The situation

Patients booked by calling or by turning up. They had no way to know whether the doctor they were referred to would be available. Records and reports lived on paper that they were expected to carry. Refills depended on remembering a date, and the status of a visit was a question for the front desk.

None of this is a clinical failure. It is an access failure, and it is repeated every day in every ward where the system of record is not within reach of the person it describes.

What we built

A patient app and portal, connected to the hospital information system, that handle the five moments above. Appointments are booked online. A managed record of scheduled and needed medications reminds the patient of refills. Doctors can be found by location and specialty. Reports are online and a touch away. The interface is customizable and multilingual, because a patient app that only works in one language works for some of the patients.

The app also includes simple tools to calculate BMI and blood sugar levels at any time, so a patient can track a number between visits.

What changed

Booking stopped being a phone call. Access to records stopped depending on where the patient was standing. The front desk was relieved of a stream of status questions that an app answers better. The larger point is that the hospital's investment in its information system became visible to patients for the first time.