Top Features to Consider When Building Your Next-Gen Healthcare Mobile App

Let’s face it, everyone gets sick. And we’d all like to have at least some insight into our own well-being. That’s why big mobile companies, including Apple, Google, Samsung and others have released health and activity tracking mobile apps that let users enter their age, weight, height and set fitness challenges to improve their physical condition. In addition a variety of fitness tracking devices exist, such as Apple Watch, watches using Wear OS (Google’s Operating System for smartwatches and other wearables), and of course fitness-specific devices such as the Fitbit, Garmin and Polar wearables—not to mention all the apps from healthcare companies that offer users a more personal solution. So, if personal health has such high mobile growth potential, how can a great user experience improve upon this potential? The following are a few ways to boost engagement and improve user-health at the same time.

Top 6 Healthcare Mobile App Features:

 1. Telemedicine

This feature allows users to video conference with a doctor from anywhere via a mobile device without having to worry about finding the nearest doctor at a physical location.

2. Doctor & Services Locator

If your health plan has recently changed or you are in a new location and/or need to find a specialist, this feature will help you locate the nearest doctor or service on a map by filtering exactly what you need and providing directions to get you there.

3. Intelligent Virtual Assistants/Conversational AI

Maybe you just need some basic info and don’t want to call your health insurer’s customer support and spend hours on the phone trying to find the right person. An intelligent virtual assistant (IVA), using conversational AI, enables organizations to provide automated support for many simple and repetitive tasks, that ultimately provide a better experience for patients. The Doctor & Services Locator mentioned above could be integrated with an IVA to provide a more automated and user-friendly way to provide that information.

4. Wearables Integration

As mentioned, wearables—particularly smart watches—are making many of us more health-aware—especially since adoption has increased so much in the last couple of years. Wearables make it possible to track personal health stats that encourage users to improve their physical activity. So, adding any feature that can translate to a wearable makes a huge difference in the user’s engagement with their healthcare company.
To learn more about wearables in healthcare, be sure to read mobile strategist, Todd Chusid’s blog post: Patient-First: the State of Wearables in Healthcare.

5. User Privacy

As a Healthcare plan member, a top priority when managing one’s own health is the ability to access your personal and insurance information. But how do you protect such sensitive information and provide quick access at the same time? Here is a great opportunity to develop a compelling user experience for healthcare.

Information privacy and security play a huge role in any healthcare app. Thankfully, with today’s mobile technologies, this mandatory requirement can be readily designed for.

The first approach is to give the user the option to always ask for authentication, no matter what. Typing in a username and password every time can be painful, but a few shortcuts make the user’s life easier and safer. The first is biometric authentication, which allows the user to set up an extra authentication factor (either face or fingerprint) to enable quick access to their account. Used in conjunction with carefully managed session expiration-times, ensures users don’t need to worry about their information being compromised.

6. Tailored User Experience

Lastly, it’s important for a healthcare app to maintain great usability over a wide range of users. To ensure a great mobile experience, it’s important to keep your target user in mind; this user is always defined by specific characteristics. For example: college students 18 to 25 years old.  Healthcare affects everyone, so while specific considerations should be taken for each target, it’s important that UX patterns enable general accessibility for all audiences, regardless of age, technology knowledge, etc.

The following key items should be considered when creating a tailored UX:

 Physical Patterns

• Readable font sizes & styles
• High contrast fonts and colors
• Clear feedback during important tasks
• Simple, native gestures (Swipes, tap and hold, etc.)

Cognitive Patterns

• Basic navigation actions
• Avoid hiding actions
• Clearly labelled icons
• Simple, clear nomenclature

Combining these principles with high-end visual design improves the overall user experience and ensures everyone can take the best care of their own health via easy-to-use digital solutions. Implementing the right physical and cognitive patterns while paying close attention to user demographics will yield an elegant mobile solution that provides users what they need to manage their own health via a broad range of life-improving features.

If your organization is looking to improve the healthcare experience for employees, partners and patients, please check out our Healthcare Connected Experience Strategy Kickstart. In just three weeks, this Kickstart helps you develop a next-generation digital solution to strengthen the patient-caregiver relationship and get you well on your way to providing a truly superior omni-channel experience that leverages the latest technologies and capabilities.