Bridge Patient Portal v3.0 gives patients a seamless web-to-mobile experience for scheduling, messaging, bill pay, intake, medical records and more
Consumers expect the same level of digital capability and self enablement from their healthcare providers that they have become accustomed to in other industries; and, at the core of that expectation is the healthcare consumer’s desire for the convenience of anytime, anywhere mobile access to their personal health information and providers.
In an effort to meet patient demand for self-service tools such as self-scheduling, bill payment, patient-provider messaging, electronic prescription refills and access to medical records, many healthcare organizations accumulated siloed solutions, creating complexity and confusion for patients while increasing costs and headaches for the healthcare organization. Now, with the introduction of Bridge Patient Portal® v3.0, small-to-large healthcare organizations can offer their patients an enterprise-class set of integrated tools and information patients need and expect to successfully manage their health from both a web application and mobile app.
“For a positive patient experience, the mobile app should be branded to the healthcare organization, should provide rich functionality, and that functionality should be natively built into the app, not linked out to another app or web page,” said Bridge Patient Portal CEO John Deutsch. “Bridge Patient Portal v3.0 has much of the same comprehensive functionality as our previous version, but has been completely optimized and streamlined to work seamlessly from the desktop or mobile app. We spent the last year plus rewriting the code so our customers could publish their own branded mobile app at a fraction of the cost of other options, and patients would get what they want in a mobile app—a seamless web-to-mobile experience.”
Typically, healthcare organizations have had to choose between purchasing an elementary, unbranded mobile app or building a custom, client-branded mobile app. Building a feature-rich, custom mobile app has historically been cost prohibitive for most healthcare organizations. In addition, if multiple patient engagement solutions are in use, connecting all of those solutions into a mobile app is both technically challenging and time consuming.
According to Deutsch, client-branded mobile apps typically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build and implement, pricing out healthcare organizations even as large as 1,000 providers. Because Bridge Patient Portal v3.0 has been rebuilt from the ground up, it now uses one source code for its mobile app and its web application. As a result, healthcare organizations with 25 providers or more can now afford to publish a client-branded mobile app, available in both iOS and Android. The mobile app patient portal also improves the patient experience by providing them with an identical interface and capabilities as the web application.
The new development technology used for Bridge v3.0 results in a sophisticated patient engagement solution with the convenience of a single login for web and mobile. Many studies have found that increased patient portal use leads to improved patient outcomes. With comprehensive functionality for patient engagement available in a web application, mobile app and through email/SMS/IVR messaging, healthcare consumers are empowered to help manage their own care through an integrated set of tools all under one roof.
Bridge v3.0 can reduce the costs of a full patient engagement solution which includes a branded mobile app by up to five times, while reducing the complexities associated with piece-mealed solutions such as managing multiple patient engagement software vendors and addressing technical problems. For healthcare organizations, the new development technology makes v3.0 easy to customize, four times faster to implement and easier to maintain. Bridge is also vendor-neutral, can interface with multiple EHR and RCM systems simultaneously, is HIPAA-compliant and is a 2015 ONC-Certified Patient Portal.
With input from user interface experts and existing clients, design changes were also made to Bridge v3.0 to create an optimal patient-centric experience. The new design elements make Bridge more intuitive and easier to use for patients. In addition, the new version includes a patient intake solution that allows patients to check into appointments on their phone before their appointment or at their provider’s office.
For a demonstration of Bridge Version 3.0, please visit www.bridgepatientportal.com or visit Bridge at HIMSS 2020 at booth 526.