9 Things You Didn't Know You Needed to Build a Mobile App

Last week, Gozio CEO Joshua Titus presented a webinar for Modern Healthcare, Use an 80/20 Approach to Drive Mobile Patient Engagement Success. If you missed it, you can still watch it on demand. To sum up the approach:

• Don't build from scratch. It's very time consuming and expensive, and the list of things you need to know and do to be successful is long.
• Eighty percent of the things you need to be successful with your mobile platform can be plugged in off the shelf. These things are really the same for everyone from online scheduling and portal access to digital check-in and wayfinding.
• With a foundational framework that has already been built and being able to plug in 80% of the things you need, you can focus on the 20% of things that are unique to you and maybe need custom development.

Joshua discussed in detail what it takes to build a successful mobile platform. In this post we'll recap what is involved in the foundational framework for a mobile solutions:

1. You have to build a cloud-based architecture that allows for over the air updates, live data feeds, and easy content management.
2. It must be a mobile native design for iOS and Android. Yes, they are different on the backend.
3. The design has to address a long list of edge cases like poor wi-fi or restricted data plans.
4. It also has to address dependency management between libraries (i.e, provider search, scheduling, wayfinding, etc.)
5. You have to monitor and test any updates before they go live to avoid potential problems. For example, iOS added a notch to the top of the screen. That impacted app design.
6. The navigation needs to be tight enough to create a good user experience but flexible enough to change over time.
7. In addition to all the technical components that go into the backend, user experience experts think about user stories, iconography, colors, ect.
8. They also ensure that the platform meets 508 compliance for accessibility .
9. After all of that, there are considerations around things like search. Is it based on travel time or distance? Is it people or places? Onsite or offsite? Indoors or outdoors?

It takes skilled, highly-trained developers hundreds of hours to work their way through all the things listed here and many many more. That's why it is so much easier to choose a platform that is ready to go. One that can be branded to your system's specifications and that allows the 80% of things everyone needs to be plugged in quickly and launched in weeks. Building a platform from scratch, on the other hand, can take years.

Watch the webinar, Use an 80/20 Approach to Drive Mobile Patient Engagement Success, to learn more. And if you want to understand more about what the 80% of things that everyone should have, download the Digital Health Most Wired Patient Engagement Trend Report we mentioned in the webinar. You might find this helpful as you think about your own plans.