Healthcare: shifting from “One Size fits all” to “One size fits one”.

In the article published by Tech Crunch titled “Applications Fatigue” Ben Schippers writes:

From a technology perspective, apps can be painful to build and maintain. You have to deal with the approval overlords who can be as efficient as airport security. Furthermore, bug fixing, new feature rollouts and version control is uncomfortably slow compared with that of traditional server-side development. App fatigue is as much an issue with the consumer as it is with the developer.

and

From a consumer perspective, there are just too many apps.

There are two main reasons healthcare mobile apps/chatbots are not used:

• outdated content;
• lack of personalization.

Let’s take a deep dive on these points.

Outdated Content:

• in most cases the content is “hard coded” within an app and there are no easy ways for healthcare experts [not developers] to update apps and content when needed. Each time there is a need to add new app feature or update the content of the app healthcare professionals have to put a request to their development team asking to make changes. Development team is super busy with keeping apps up and running and creating new apps — it takes a long time for them to update existing apps;
• keeping content updated across different apps and chatbots in consistent manner is a huge issue. Let’s look at a simple example. Your organization have an app for medications adherence and later developed a chatbot for medications adherence. Each time you make any changes in the app you need to make sure you also update chatbot!

Lack of personalization:

• Many healthcare apps are very generic: an app for diabetes; app for breast cancer patients; etc. Which means that patient A with breast cancer reads the same content as a patient B with breast cancer; same survey questions; same support options; features of the app. However we know that there are many dimensions of the disease: types; variations; stages, etc — patients really need to be able to get less of “noise” and more highly relevant content and features — they are patients after all!
• Many patients have more than one condition and they will not use many apps to manage their health — they are looking for integrated health management system that is personalized to them!
• There are very few apps that give patients an option to create their own health goals and action plans; provide integrated features for patients to manage their health in a highly personalized manner;
• It should be very easy for patients to use voice for example and then switch to an app without a need to repeat everything they have already asked via voice or chatbot or app.

Clearly “One size fits all” approach in healthcare apps and chatbots space is an approach that fails group of people they meant to serve: PATIENTS!

How can we switch to “One size fits one” in digital health area?

At Open Health Network we decided to implement Patient Experience Management System . It contains many features that are outlined in linked article. Over here I want to highlight some of the features that are focused on the two areas mentioned above: content management and personalization.

Content Management:

Open Health Network deployed integrated content management feature that enables experts to update content and features consistently across apps, EHRs, chatbots, voice-enabled apps. This feature is super important to anyone who is deploying any digital health offerings.

Organizations who are not thinking about their ongoing content management and extensibility options will end up with prohibitively expensive long term maintenance costs.

Personalization:

Open Health Network designed sophisticated rules engine that enables apps to automatically adapt to each patient: look & feel; options; questions; content.

Patients will stop using “generic” mobile health apps — they are tired of “noise” and looking for highly relevant to them offerings. “One size fits all” solutions are poised to fail! It’s time for “One size fits one”!

For more information contact me at at tkanzaveli@gmail.com