Hospital Apps Becoming More Patient-Friendly, Actually Being Used

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center started developing the idea for a patient and family experience mobile phone app in 2016, after receiving some negative feedback from patient families.

They said “it was very difficult to navigate our healthcare system,” said Melissa Cloud, Cincinnati Children’s director of integrated operations, calling out pain points like keeping track of paper parking tickets and finding their way to their appointments.

The answer, at least for some patients, was an app. That way, patients and their families could carry around that information in their pocket, without having to gather stacks of paper throughout their visit.

Four years later, 37,000 people have the app, dubbed Caren, loaded onto their smartphones.