Case Study

Talksoft Corporation demonstrates the success of their Branded Mobile App service, a cost effective option for practices or hospitals to develop a mobile application for their patients.

The Orthopedic Institute of Pennsylvania provides orthopedic care to Central Pennsylvania with twenty board-certified orthopedic physicians and supporting physicians assistants. As a Talksoft customer since 2012, OIP helped pilot Talksoft's iPhone application - Talksoft Connect - which they added to their existing phone, email, and SMS reminders for appointments and billing reminders.

After their exposure to the Talksoft Connect appointment reminder app, OIP wanted to develop a mobile application specific to their practice. This was prompted by the OIP marketing team as they looked for new ways to reach patients and based on feedback from their patient base.

"The way we are going with technology, computers are being used less, we are working on mobile devices more often. Patients are going to start demanding applications from a practice, especially within healthcare. They want to be able to communicate," says Scott Shelley, Outreach Coordinator at the Orthopedic Institute of Pennsylvania.

Because of this demand and OIP's desire to provide patients with a single, cohesive mobile experience, OIP and Talksoft collaborated on a new app, OIP Connect. The app uses the patent-pending technology that powers the messaging features within Talksoft Connect but delivers to OIP patients the look, feel, and pertinent information of OIP.

OIP Connect's home screen has icons that give patients the ability to request an appointment, access the patient portal and bill pay, and view contact information and directions for all of their offices directly within the app. Shelley notes that having a platform that directs patients to key information has resulted in very low no-show and cancellations requests. He largely credits their communication strategy and the branded app which gives patients quick access to all the information they may need within one application.

Creating this communication platform through the branded app is now a service offered by Talksoft. This service responds to the growing rate of smartphone and app usage, especially in Healthcare.

HealthIT.gov recently reported that 17 million consumers use mobile devices to access health information. The use of smartphones has created a demand for health and medical apps. The Juniper Research report recently predicted that health care and medical app downloads will reach 142 million by 2016.

"The built in appointment reminder functionality encourages patients to download the app since it provides them with a direct and tangible benefit," says Steve David, CTO at Talksoft. "Instead of pushing patients onto an app, it pulls them in by providing dynamic and personal appointment data that is delivered to their device whenever a new appointment is scheduled."

Working with Talksoft, a robust custom app with a practice's look and feel will be created. The practice can link it's own website functionality to the Talksoft services with practice information relevant to the office such as: locations, link to the portal, online bill payment, appointment scheduling, and more. Building a stand alone app not only has less functionality, but can cost significantly more to develop.

"We had worked out pricing with custom app developers to build an app to our specs -- which is exactly what Talksoft did-- and these developers were quoting up to $30,000," says Scott Shelley, Outreach Coordinator at the Orthopedic Institute of Pennsylvania. "Working with Talksoft to create a branded app was significantly less money. It is a very cost effective solution."

Sources:
http://www.amednews.com/article/20120220/business/302209960/6/
http://www.healthit.gov/patients-families/electronic-health-records-infographic