Seattle Children’s built an app for youths and their households to do Zoom-powered virtual visits, entry their MyChart patient portal and navigate the hospital. But its creators told Becker’s they want to maintain pushing to create the “ChatGPT” or “Google Calendar” of digital front doors.
The hospital debuted the app in 2020, however has since added options such as a Spanish language model, a common search function, an Epic EHR-integrated surgery tracker, a virtual waiting line to speak to a pharmacist, and urgent-care reserving and virtual appointments.
“Our North Star was to have it to be your digital concierge, your front door to the hospital with an equity lens in mind,” mentioned Charlie Kim, a software improvement manager at Seattle Children’s.
“We’re actually offering a space for households to go for a one-stop shop,” mentioned Christina Berry-White, product manager for the Seattle Children’s app.
The app’s developers say they are not done enhancing it. They’d like to search out ways for patients and families to connect with each other, create and receive e-cards, ship kudos to workers, and have entry to extra schooling sources.
The “pie-in-the-sky” vision is for the platform to be interoperable so patients can exchange information with all their suppliers and pharmacies in a single place, Mr. Kim stated.
“The app would be a Google Calendar of medical events/Apple Notes — being able to combine all these disparate systems so families needn’t ask each of their respective care teams: ‘Where’s my information? How can I get this to the next person that wants it?'” he stated. “We’d wish to construct one thing that is nearly like a ChatGPT for healthcare, the place it just sort of knows what you’re going to put in earlier than you even put in one thing simply because it has all this data.”
That would include figuring out what language the patient speaks in order that it mechanically translates for them.
Helping attain that objective would be the app’s six developers and product supervisor, a gaggle Seattle Children’s plans to expand. “Having this internal staff has actually supplied us the flexibility to move quickly and in an agile fashion to reply to any points that the business may be having, to add content, and actually simply provide the assets households need in a quicker trend,” Ms. Berry-White stated.
Seattle Children’s will get ideas for brand new options from its monthly family advisory board meetings with sufferers’ households. The hospital makes sure the digital entrance door stays correct and updated by providing families a possibility to report incorrect knowledge and proactively attain out to businesses to ensure their information is appropriate. The group also plans to maintain encouraging clinicians to remind folks to obtain the app.
“Navigating healthcare for anyone is very annoying, especially in a pediatric situation where you are making an attempt to navigate it on your baby,” Ms. Berry-White mentioned.
“When households are in dialog with their care team, they’re very focused on the analysis and the remedy plan. And the employees would not at all times have the time to reply questions like, ‘How do I get Child Life services?’ Or, ‘Where can I go to rest during my kid’s surgery?’ So we really simply wished to offer a means for families to entry the information they wanted once they wanted it.”
