Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting

Date Submitted: Apr 22, 2022
Date Accepted: Sep 1, 2022

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

The Current State of Mobile Apps Owned by Large Pediatric Hospitals in the United States: Systematic Search and Analysis on Google Play and Apple App Stores

Lieser T, Huang Y, Sezgin E

The Current State of Mobile Apps Owned by Large Pediatric Hospitals in the United States: Systematic Search and Analysis on Google Play and Apple App Stores

JMIR Pediatr Parent 2022;5(4):e38940

DOI: 10.2196/38940

PMID: 36201385

PMCID: 9585439

Current State of Mobile Apps Owned by Large Pediatric Hospitals in the U.S.: A Review of Google Play and Apple App Stores

  • Tyler Lieser; 
  • Yungui Huang; 
  • Emre Sezgin

ABSTRACT

Background:

Pediatric hospitals around the United States are increasingly leveraging patient facing mobile apps as their digital front doors for patients, families, and caretakers. These mobile health apps are sanctioned by pediatric hospitals to inform the public or populations about pediatric care, to provide individualized information, to enhance communication, and to improve patient experience. Yet, the design, functionalities, and user feedback of these hospital mobile apps have not been systematically investigated.

Objective:

Our aim is to understand the current state of hospital-owned mobile apps provided by large pediatric hospitals, comparatively analyze, and report the services provided, and identify potential gaps to inform developers and providers.

Methods:

We conducted a systematic search on Google Play and Apple App Store platforms to identify all hospital-owned mobile apps from the pediatric hospitals included in our review. Specialty apps centered around specific clinical departments, research, procedures, or conditions were excluded. Features and functionality of included apps were examined.

Results:

Of the 16 pediatric hospitals included in our review, 4 had no general patient facing apps, 4 had one app, and 8 had more than one app available on Google Play or Apple App Store. The 12 hospitals with at least one mobile app had a combined total of 73 apps. 62 of these apps were considered specialty and were excluded from our review, leaving a total of 11 apps to analyze. The most common feature among apps was appointment scheduling/reminder (82%). Doctor search (73%) and patient resources (73%) were the second most common, followed by payment/billing/claims (64%), patient portal integration (55%), personal health management (55%), hospital wayfinding (45%), message a provider (36%), urgent care wait times (36%), video chat (36%), health information access (36%). Parking information (27%) was the least common.

Conclusions:

Out of 16 pediatric hospitals identified for our review, 75% offer mobile apps. Based on the most common features, these apps were designed to help improve accessibility for patients and families in terms of finding providers, scheduling appointments, and accessing patient resources. We believe the findings will inform pediatric hospital administrators, developers, and other stakeholders to improve app feature offerings and to increase their impact on service accessibility and patient experience.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Lieser T, Huang Y, Sezgin E

The Current State of Mobile Apps Owned by Large Pediatric Hospitals in the United States: Systematic Search and Analysis on Google Play and Apple App Stores

JMIR Pediatr Parent 2022;5(4):e38940

DOI: 10.2196/38940

PMID: 36201385

PMCID: 9585439

Download PDF


Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.

© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.