Client story Enhancing Patient Care With a Digital Experience
Learn how a mobile app and natural language chatbot helped a children’s hospital reduce stress for families and improve the patient experience.
By Insight Editor / 15 Feb 2019 / Topics: Data and AI Application development Microsoft Azure
Facts at a glance
Client industry:
Healthcare
Size of company:
Multisite with 15,000+ employees
Challenge:
The client sought an innovative, digital solution to reduce the stress of hospital visits and improve the patient and family experience.
Solution:
- Robust mobile app leveraging Microsoft Azure
- Natural language chatbot to quickly answer questions
Results:
- Improved patient experience
- Reduced stress for families
- Real-time surgery tracking and notification
- Immediate answers through a chatbot
- Simplified parking through a digital parking pass
Solution area:
Insight’s Digital Innovation solutions help clients incorporate emerging tech into their business operations to improve the customer experience.
Every day at a healthcare facility for children, families receive life-altering news that will set them on a journey of care. But that journey is often marked by myriad questions and unnecessary stress. Family members must grapple with both the responsibilities and emotions of caring for a loved one.
Hospital visits can be confusing when obtaining the right information isn’t always easy. Anxiety can build while parents wait to receive updates during surgery or have questions and don’t know who to contact, or how. Simple things such as remembering to get parking validation or navigating the medical campus can also be taxing.
And for children, being in a hospital can be scary or boring. Kids look to their parents for answers, comfort and even entertainment.
The healthcare industry is becoming more consumer-oriented, responding to the growing availability of healthcare choice and an increasing focus on the user experience across all industries.
A healthcare organization partnered with Insight to find meaningful ways to transform its overall experience.
Recognizing the many pain points of patients and their families, a healthcare organization partnered with Insight to find meaningful ways to transform its overall experience.
Delivering a more personalized experience
Together, Insight and the healthcare organization conducted a thorough examination of common patient and family challenges and pain points. Once we had a better understanding of where people turn for help, we created a vision to provide 24/7, comprehensive and engaging concierge services through a user-friendly mobile app.
The app would be a convenient and customized resource to help users:
- Easily navigate the hospital campus.
- View current activities for the day.
- Receive real-time updates for a child’s surgery progress.
- Simplify parking with an electronic parking pass and parking spot reminder.
- Ask questions — or hear a joke — through a natural language chatbot.
- View resources, such as urgent care wait times, available food and amenities.
Additionally, the app would feature a scavenger hunt game to help entertain children during wait times.
To accomplish this long list of user features — which involve requiring artificial intelligence and machine learning — our Digital Innovation team recommended Microsoft Azure. The agile, scalable cloud platform is rich in capabilities, such as Cognitive Services and Bot Services.
Since the hospital IT team lacked experience building native iOS and Android apps, Insight provided the expertise to help develop the single codebase for the Xamarin app through Microsoft Visual Studio Tools, hosted in Azure.
The app became available on both operating systems, and the comfortable development environment made it easy for the hospital IT team to build on the foundation and launch new features over time.
Making a difference
Working with the hospital, we developed and deployed the first iteration of the app in a mere 13 weeks. We then launched a pilot period to test the app and gather feedback from actual users. Immediate feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
The hospital released the app to the general public and gained more than 1,000 users within three weeks — and adoption continues to soar.
The app alleviates some of the stresses of a hospital visit and lets parents focus on their children undergoing care. They no longer have to worry about validating their parking ticket or remembering where they parked the car — the app contains their parking pass, and a QR scanner remembers their parking location.
If walking onto a new campus or arriving for an appointment in an unfamiliar building, users can refer to the app for wayfinding.
When a child is undergoing surgery, families receive real-time updates about the progress of their child through push notifications. This allows them to make better use of their time, such as getting something to eat or taking a walk, without worrying about not being there when their child comes out of the operating room.
The Microsoft native language chatbot capabilities are available 24/7, so users can always find immediate answers to their questions, whenever they arise. The chatbot even knows a few jokes to lighten the mood and provide entertainment during waiting periods.
The healthcare organization is drastically improving the patient and family experience — and empowering parents to focus on what matters most: the well-being of a child.
By offering a comprehensive suite of concierge services in the convenience of a mobile app, the healthcare organization is drastically improving the patient and family experience — and empowering parents to focus on what matters most: the well-being of a child.
