Driving digitalization in healthcare: new Medgate app with video consultation

Situation

Medgate, a leading provider of telemedicine and healthcare in Switzerland, has identified the need to make use of digital technologies to improve their customers' user experience and ultimately transform the way patients receive medical care. For more than 18 years, Medgate has provided medical advice 24/7 - predominantly by phone. In our digital era, patients are starting to expect having access to all their medical information in the palm of their hands, anytime and anywhere, as well as to receive enhanced medical care through digital communication channels that enable new ways to exchange medical data. When Medgate was looking into redefining their service through innovative technologies, they approached Open Web Technology to design a new mobile app to provide patients with a simple, efficient and safe access to high quality medical information and treatment.

Approach

Open Web Technology's team, together with the client, followed our proven three-step approach to turn this vision into reality:

1. Concept Analysis

In the first phase of the project we worked closely with Medgate to understand and document all expected functionalities, including their business and technical complexity, as well as Medgate's business priorities, in order to create a short and long-term implementation roadmap for the app.

2. User Experience

Following the analysis phase, our team focused in gathering the business requirements to outline the desired outcome. By creating user journeys and a clickable prototype, we designed the most suitable user experience, crafting the look and feel of the mobile app and allowing to get client as well as user validation before investing in any line of code.

3. Delivery

Once validated, the implementation of the new Medgate app focused on delivering business value in short incremental phases, that could be validated and improved directly from the end user's feedback.

• Digital Foundation. In the first development phase the foundation for the project was laid, with basic functionality, such as user management, help and contact information, which was only rudimentarily implemented in a previous version of the app. However, the core new functionality to be implemented was the online appointment booking, allowing users to conveniently book teleconsultation appointments directly in the app
• Improved End-to-End User Experience. Once the foundation was implemented, we focused on delivering an end-to-end digital user experience, by allowing the user to directly access treatment information in the app, upload pictures and videos before the consultation and define favorite doctors for future appointments.
• Digital Innovation. The completely redeveloped app allowed Medgate to offer new and exciting digital services. Video consultations, where patients can talk to a doctor through a video call using their mobile phones, stands out as the most important new feature. This service allows a better visual communication between patients and doctors, who can in return provide more accurate medical advice.

Thanks to the work of our team, Medgate has been able to deliver an application that reached the top 3 in the Medical App iOS category of the App Store and is used by patients all around Switzerland to book teleconsultations, talk to doctors through video calls and check their treatment plans directly in the app. We are looking forward to further innovations to enable patients to receive better medical care, anytime and anywhere.

HealthTech is growing rapidly and traditional healthcare players must jump on the digital journey to stay in the game. Read more about it and find  here also more healthcare cases