need to aggressively promote the new
services to cut through all that mobile
chatter and inform consumers, says Dan
Davidson, vice president of marketing at
four-hospital Sunrise Health, serving the
Las Vegas region.
Since May 2010 the health system has
been using software from iTriage LLC
of Denver to provide information on its
emergency departments, including cur-
rent wait times.
Consumers can access a symptoms
checker that helps them determine if they
should visit an emergency department, and
get a list of the closest hospitals.
Finding help
The software will flag the closest ER regard-
less of whether it’s a Sunrise Health hospital.
The delivery system pays a fee to i Triage for
additional information on their services to
be displayed, such as current wait times and
an “iNotify” feature that enables a consumer
to let the ER know they are coming in and
transmit their current symptoms.
Notifying the ER of a pending arrival,
however, doesn’t get the consumer to the
head of the line when he or she arrives un-
less the acuity of symptoms compels more
rapid action. Text messages, billboards,
the Sunrise Web site and other advertis-
ing venues have helped increase interest in
Sunrise hospitals’ ER information service,
Davidson says. Displays of ER wait times
and the additional iNotify functions also
is done in hospital elevators and even on
hand sanitizers at the airport. “We’re mak-
ing information available to the consumer
where the consumer is looking for us.”
Some of the ads have a Quick Read, or
QR, code, a newer type of bar code that can
be scanned with a mobile device. The de-
livery system can get reports on how many
consumers are scanning an ad. It’s too early,
however, to say how effective those ads are,
Davidson adds.
Nothing fancy
Curran advises peers to not give a new mo-
bile service a fancy name; make it a name
patients already know. If an organization is
using a specific vendor app, consumers like-
ly will search their app store for the vendor
name of the app, not an organization-brand-
ed name. For example, Dean Clinic kept
the MyChart name of Epic’s patient portal,
which also is the name of the mobile app.
Physicians, Curran says, are the ones
who have had the most surprises in store
when working in an environment where
patients increasingly can get the informa-
tion as quickly as the docs can. It’s hap-
pened more than once: A patient goes
to urgent care and gets a strep test, and
when the result comes back and the phy-
sician returns to the exam room, the pa-
tient isn’t there.
That’s because the patient already saw
the test result, which was negative, via
the mobile app and left. “It’s shocking to
providers to actually be taken out of that
loop,” Curran says.
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