Tag: MobileSmith

Healthcare’s Most Pressing Problems, According To Its Leaders (Part 3)

Most likely, in one of the few lucid moments you have in your hectic, even chaotic schedule you contemplate healthcare’s greatest problems, its most pressing questions that must be solved, obstacles and the most important hurdles that must be overcome, and how doing so would alleviate many of your woes. That’s likely an overstatement. The problems are many, some of the obstacles overwhelming.

There are opportunities, of course. But opportunities often come from problems that must be solved. And, as the saying goes, for everyone you ask, you’re likely to receive a different answer to what needs to be first addressed. So, in this series (see part 1 and part 2), we examine some of healthcare’s most pressing challenges, according to some of the sector’s most knowledgeable voices.

Without further delay, the following are some of the problems in need of solutions. Or, in other words, some of healthcare’s greatest opportunities. What is healthcare’s most pressing question, problem, hurdle, obstacle, thing to overcome? And how that can be solved/addressed?

Dekel Gelbman, CEO, FDNA

Dekel Gelbman
Dekel Gelbman

The biggest hurdle in healthcare is the adoption and ethical use of AI, and the ability to share data gathered from it in a safe and secure way to gain actionable insights. More specifically, the world is moving towards consumer genomics. This type of technology will help patients and their caregivers better understand their health and allow for more personalized care plans—this is our role in the future of precision medicine.

Randy Tomlin, CEO and chairman of the board, MobileSmith

A pressing question for many healthcare execs is “how can I gain loyalty from the next generation of patients? With the estimated lifetime value of a new patient at $600,000, and Millennials and Generation Z making up one-half of the U.S. population, the stakes are high. Healthcare lags behind other industries in adopting a mobile-first strategy, but some health systems are branding their own mobile apps because they know that it speaks to the engaged-consumer mindset of these populations. In many cases, mobile app technology has proven to increase patient engagement, education and loyalty, while improving a hospital’s bottom line.

Justin Barad, MD and founder, Osso VR

Justin Barad, MD
Justin Barad, MD

During my surgical training, I experienced firsthand the greatest challenge facing our healthcare system today: how we train and assess our providers. Data shows that our century-old apprenticeship based system of surgical training is struggling under a growing number of procedures and decreased hands-on time with patients. At the end of at least 14 years of education and accumulating six figures of debt, 30 percent of residency graduates still cannot operate independently. Even surgeons in practice are finding immense challenges learning new procedures and bringing them to patients. This is limiting the adoption of higher value modern technologies and limiting patient access to these lifesaving procedures. Virtual reality is opening the door for increased access and skill development in a highly precise and like-life environment. Residency programs and medical device companies are adopting virtual reality to have a much more natural learning experience with a much higher retention rate than conventional observational methods such as a book or video. We have harnessed immersive technologies to improve patient outcomes, increase the adoption of higher value medical technologies and democratize access to surgical education around the world.

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Health IT Startup: MobileSmith

Bob Dieterle
Bob Dieterle

MobileSmith is an online app development platform, enabling hospitals and health organizations to create custom, native apps, across iPhone, Android and iPad devices, without any coding required.

Elevator Pitch

We have a platform that allows a marketing department with no development experience to create custom, native mobile apps. With us, any hospital can enhance their patient engagement strategy, without coding, and without the cost of hiring developers.

Founders Story

The earliest foundations of the company that would become MobileSmith, were laid in 1993. Back then, the company, known as SmartOnline, sold software to assist small businesses. SmartOnline became one of the early pioneers of the SaaS (Software as a Service) model that we use today. The company worked to adapt to the constantly changing technology. In 2010, the company hired Bob Dieterle as senior VP and general manager. He advocated and orchestrated a complete overhaul of the company services, and focused the company, instead, on the budding industry of mobile applications. The company wanted to deliver organizations a means to quickly create and manage apps to connect to their consumers, without having to rely heavily on an IT department. Working to that end, the MobileSmith online platform was developed, and in July 2013, the overhaul was complete, as the company rebranded itself as MobileSmith Inc. and has since focused entirely on delivering quality and cost-effective mobile apps to organizations.

Market Opportunity and Strategy

There are several app development platforms out there, such as Appcelerator or Kony. These platforms still require a programmer or developer to write code for the apps. Our platform requires no coding whatsoever. A designer or marketer can easily come to us and use our platform to design, prototype, build and deploy an app. While we have clients from a variety of fields, healthcare providers have found our platform particularly useful. With healthcare IT departments swamped with EHR implementation and marketing desperately trying to enhance patient engagement options, our platform has been able to fill their needs without placing any further burden on their IT, and avoiding the higher labor cost of developers. As only 35 percent of healthcare providers offer mobile apps, according to the HIMSS Analytics Survey, there is a clear need in the healthcare industry for our platform, and several organizations have found us to be an excellent means of enhancing their patient engagement via mobile apps.

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