Quality of care is based on two metrics, patient outcomes and patient satisfaction. Implementing tools that enhance patient satisfaction has become one of the main focuses of healthcare IT teams today. mHealth apps can be utilized to improve patients’ hospital experiences, often leading to higher scoring on HCAHPS surveys. We’ve highlighted a few ways mHealth apps with patient engagement and care coordination features enable hospitals to improve their patient satisfaction scores.

Improving Communication with Patients

mHealth apps that help patients navigate through the hospital systems improve patients’ overall experience, and reduce unnecessary frustrations. By utilizing these features, patients better manage their health-related issues and reduce their time spent coordinating care.

• Patient Portal Access: Patients are able to quickly access and review their providers’ medical recommendations, prescriptions, and clinical records. This enables patients to make more informed health decisions pre and post discharge.
• Patient Engagement Features: Patients should be able to easily access any event organized by their hospital. Their mHealth app should also be equipped with targeted content to keep patients informed and engaged with their hospital network throughout the care process.
• Hospital Communication: Patients can message, email or call their hospitals’ concierge team for assistance and make requests directly from their mobile app. Patients can also easily search for providers within their hospital network.

Communication with Nurses and Doctors

Secure communication between patients and their clinical care teams help improve the patient experience. By using mobile communication features such as secure messaging, email and voice calls, patients can exchange information with their provider and care team outside of the office setting.

• Secure messaging for high risk, high cost patients: Patients should be able to request immediate medical assistance through various communication channels including secure messaging. With this, patients should be able to directly message members of their care team and receive answers quickly. As physician-patient communication improves, patients are able to better manage their health conditions and stress levels, and follow through on treatment plans.
• Access to lab results: Patients whose mobile apps allow them to remotely access laboratory results become more engaged members of the care process. Through these apps, patients should be able to grant their loved ones access to their health information. In this way, caregivers can support patients with managing their health outside of the hospital setting, and alleviate burdens associated with decision-making.
• Appointment management: Patients should be able to schedule an appointment and easily find the location of physicians’ offices. Mobile appointment reminder delivery can also help patients prepare for their visits and prevent patient no-shows. These features together improve access to care.

Improving the Hospital Environment

Hospitals that adopt well executed mobile care coordination apps experience minimized delays in care. Apps with secure communication and data integration capabilities enable physicians and clinicians to exchange patient data in real-time and make more informed care decisions.

• Quiet, pleasant experience: Secure messaging enables clinical care teams to communicate with each other quickly and quietly. They should have the option of either sending images or videos, and sending group or individual messages. These features make care coordination less intrusive, ultimately creating a more pleasant experience for patients.
• Reduced wait time: Patients spend less time waiting during visits when their care teams communicate more efficiently. Time spent with their provider is optimized and quality of care is improved.

mHealth apps can support hospitals in delivering high quality care to patients more efficiently, thereby helping them to improve patient satisfaction scores. Patient-centric mHealth apps provide hospitals with a solid foundation that improve and sustain overall patient satisfaction. This 350 bed regional medical center, for instance, improved care delivery and coordination, generating millions in savings: