5 Ways Healthcare Mobile Apps Can Improve Patient Care
The mobile revolution is reshaping every industry—and the medical industry is no exception. Healthcare mobile apps are making their mark on the way small practices are delivering care by untethering that care from a particular location or time.
Being able to complete tasks on-the-go and having access to real-time information has become a necessity in medical practices today:
If you are unable to provide urgent patient care during emergencies or unable to track your patients’ health from any location at any time, then you are delivering an outdated healthcare experience.
Deploying software that integrates mobile technology, such as mobile patient portal or mobile EHR apps, can bring your practice up to speed.
The mobile healthcare tech world is moving fast: It’s set to grow from $1.77 billion in 2016 to nearly $19.39 billion by 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 40 percent. Healthcare mobile apps are more than a flash in the pan.
Below we’ve listed five ways small medical practices can hitch themselves to this upward trend and use mobile apps to improve patient care:
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Empower Your Patients With Mobile Patient Portals
Access and Create Patient Charts From Anywhere
Use Images Captured and Shared Via Mobile App
Deliver Unprecedented Convenience With E-Prescriptions
Share Relevant Educational Material With Patients
Recommendations: What to Do Next
Empower Your Patients With Mobile Patient Portals
Your patients prefer to use their smartphones to view their health status reports. Meet your patients where they already are by offering a patient portal that’s accessible through their mobile devices.
Patient health records in PrognoCIS patient portal mobile app
Through a patient portal mobile app, your patients will be able to do the following tasks instantly from anywhere:
Immediately connect with the practice and physicians using a smartphone to schedule appointments and also in case of any emergency.
Track medications they’re supposed to take and also set up reminder notifications to make sure they don’t miss their medications.
Access medical resources and other health-related educational information provided by the practice from any location and at any time via mobile device.
Patient portal mobile apps empower your patients to take more responsibility regarding their individual health and enhance engagement significantly. As a bonus, you’ll improve your number of overall appointments and elevate the quality of patient care.
By offering your patients access to portals via mobile, you’ll receive benefits too such as:
Solving patient queries through electronic messaging in real time
Sending appointment and scheduling reminders to patients
Thus, the right electronic health record (EHR) software for your practice will offer a patient portal with built-in mobile integration.
Access and Create Patient Charts From Anywhere
If you’re spending extra time at your medical practice preparing patient charts, you need a mobile EHR app. A mobile EHR app allows you to access and prepare patient charts from a preferred location at any time.
This allows you to spend more time engaging with patients during a visit, rather than worrying about preparing and updating charts. And when you do create your charts, you get a clear interface that’s easy to fill out, as you can see here:
Create patient charts on iPad through Kareo mobile EHR
You’ll also achieve various benefits while using a mobile EHR app for charting:
It’ll offer you searchable access to full patient histories along with charting capabilities with just the touch of a finger.
You can carry thousands of chart templates in your pocket and practice medicine from any location at any time.
In addition, patients will enjoy lower wait times while physicians access their documents and charts through mobile EHR apps. This point can’t be overstated: Medical practices that are unable to decrease wait times frustrations among patients lose almost 54 percent of their patients in a year.
Mobile patient charts are a win-win: patients enjoy improved physician engagement and your practice enjoys higher rates of patient retention.
Securely Capture and Share Diagnostic Images
It’s difficult to visualize a patient’s symptoms solely on the basis of prior written medical records. The solution to the problem of capturing physical patient symptoms is simple: a mobile EHR app with image capturing functionality that can securely take photos of anything from a simple skin rash to a complex injury mark.
Most medical practices rely on actual images of a patient’s problem area or injury marks for comparison purposes during follow-up patient visits, and mobile EHR apps are the ideal way to capture actual images.
Mobile image capture in OfficeEMR
The image capture feature connects the mobile EHR app with your device’s camera and securely uploads the image into the EHR under the patient’s medical history section.
The benefits you’ll reap include the following:
You’ll have accurate and clear visual details about the patient’s problem, resulting in enhanced quality of patient care.
Time saved, since many practices depend upon a separate camera to capture images, which are then transferred to the EHR system. Capturing images directly to a mobile EHR app circumvents this process.
Peace of mind for the patient and speed of process for the practice makes implementing a mobile healthcare app vital.
Deliver Unprecedented Convenience With E-Prescriptions
If you are a busy healthcare provider, you’ve likely found yourself unable to field an urgent patient phone call requesting a prescription. Precious time ticks by as the patient is left waiting in a state of distress.
A mobile EHR app can help you here, as it allows you to prescribe patient medications electronically from any location and time.
E-Prescribing is the term for a medical practice’s ability to send prescriptions to a pharmacy electronically. The mobile app not only adds to your convenience through portability but also significantly enhances the quality of patient care.
Mobile e-prescribing process through Kareo EHR mobile app
E-Prescribing via a mobile app has several benefits:
It allows physicians to handle prescription requests quickly, helping both patients and practices.
Physicians can monitor medication adherence by patients more effectively from any location and at any time, thus increasing the quality of care.
Prescription requests go directly from a physician’s mobile device to the concerned pharmacy electronically, and the physician instantly receives an automated confirmation from the pharmacy about the request being received, keeping all statuses up-to-date in real time.
Delivering a better experience when your patient needs you most can be a game changer for many practices.
Share Relevant Educational Material With Patients
Your practice can give patients all the information they need during a visit, but if it isn’t remembered, it won’t help. During and after a stressful visit, spoken information can overwhelm and a handful of pamphlets can get misplaced.
To enhance the knowledge of your patients, you should share appropriate educational material for your patients to view on their patient portal mobile app. The right mobile EHR app will allow practices like yours to upload audio, video and reading material that is customized for each patient, per their preferences.
In addition, you can also integrate survey questionnaires into the mobile app to receive and measure patient satisfaction through feedback regarding various areas of your practice.
For instance, drchrono mobile EHR app allows physicians to send a document to their patient or save the document to their favorites for future requirements.
Patient education on drchrono Mobile EHR (Source)
Here are just a few of the benefits of sharing educational material for you and your patients:
Enhanced usability: Copies of educational materials get misplaced. Uploading information on the apps keeps it accessible from any location and at any time.
Increased patient engagement: Patient education through mobile healthcare apps is interactive in nature, resulting in better engagement. In addition, it can promote awareness among patients on various health issues and encourage them to set health goals and make changes to live a healthier life.
Help your patients be more informed about their own health by leveraging functionalities of healthcare mobile apps.
Recommendations: What to Do Next
Mobile apps will soon dominate a medical practice by allowing both physicians and patients to do tasks such as help monitor medications, schedule appointments, e-prescribing, follow-up with physicians and patient engagement.
Using a mobile app, small medical practices like yours can achieve better-coordinated clinical workflow and real-time access to patient health information, meaning patients receive an extraordinary healthcare experience.
If you’re planning to integrate a mobile app capability within your existing EHR system, talk to your vendor if they offer one.
If your existing vendor doesn’t offer a mobile app but you’ve made up your mind to install one, check out the latest mobile EHR software in the market, or call us at (844) 686-5616 for a free consultation with a software advisor. Also, to view products, visit the Mobile EHR software page on our website.