From never-ending waits for emergency patients

Our client, a Swiss University Hospital, occupies a central place in the distribution of care and patient management. This situation requires complex infrastructure and logistics, especially in the emergency department. One of the daily logistical challenges is managing patient flow. The Emergency department is a stressful environment and implies uncertainty and concerns among patients. These combined often overwhelm medical staff and distract them from their primary purpose.

Our client faces the issues above on a daily basis, which ultimately reduce the effectiveness of the services and therefore the quality of the patients' journey. On the other hand, inpatient should also be able to access relevant information about the hospital, but also patient-centric information. If a patient wanted to know more about his journey in the emergency department or if he was interested in accessing general information about the hospital, our client had no tool to communicate on it.

To a clear, understandable journey

We designed and developed a Progressive Web App (PWA) that addresses big hospital challenges, especially within the emergency department. With a simple scan of the QR code admission form, patients can access their journey details and search for information online and offline, wherever they are in the hospital. It is easily accessible for anybody with a smartphone and offers the same user experience as a native app without the struggles of downloading an app for single use.

 

PWA Health Patient Experience

Mobile App User Experience

 

The Web app is saving tremendous time for all medical staff involved with emergencies by sharing real-time and relevant information with patients. Not only can they now find out about occupancy rate and estimated waiting time, but they can also monitor in real-time all their personal next steps: the first evaluation, the nurse consultation, the required testing, all the way up to the medical examination.

On top of that, The Web App informs the patients on all the necessary administrative documents needed, increasing, even more, the pace of the emergency process. Given all the information available to the patients, there is very limited self-questioning and unnecessary requests to hospital employees, but a more serene environment in the emergency department. The Web app now centralizes the whole patient journey and allows medical staff to fully focus on their priorities and help managing in and outpatients.

Iterative journey

  • Interview Client to understand his needs
  • Create mockups
  • Develop the PWA
  • Interface with Client tools
  • Deliver to Client

Occupancy rate and waiting time

Without being logged in your Web App, occupancy rates and waiting time are displayed in real-time to give a clear overview of the situation at the emergencies.

QR code reader

When a patient arrives at the emergency, he receives an admission form, which has a patient specific barcode. This code can then be scanned using the Web App and allows the patient to access all his personal information directly on his smartphone. It avoids Patients to download a native app for just a single use.

Journey and admin details

Every steps of the journey are listed with the approximative waiting time between each step. It gives an explicit and concise summary of all the intervention that his situation will require at the emergency.

About Progressive Web Apps

App development technologies can be classified into 4 major categories: Native (iOS, Android), Web (Ionic) or Native (Fluter) Hybride or Progressive Web Application.
A Progressive Web App (PWA), is actually a web application. This application gathers different pages of a site that will be displayed with the same functionality as a mobile application. It is therefore a compromise between the information contained in a website, but with a display and operation that resembles that of an application.

Progressive Web Apps make it possible to offer an Internet user ease of use, such as he would have found it on an application, without having to go through the download and installation steps.
PWA are not only user friendly but also SEO Friendly. Most native apps don't have links to their content, so you can't share them. Meanwhile, in PWA, it is possible to reference and share URLs with everyone, even to google!  Therefore can be indexed by Google and other search engines.

You can find another use case demonstrating how a website with mobile superpowers (PWA) can boost the cyber-administration of tomorrow.

Digital Patient Journey - Podcast

In this podcast, we explain and demonstrate how to improve the patient experience through digital technologies.


Open Web Technology and Pallas Kliniken explain how players in the health care system are moving closer to the patient and providing better care. Various examples will demonstrate how a consistent focus on the patient leads to success. You will learn how customer experience, communication, and data security can improve the patient journey.

Learn more about this project

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