Apple Watch and healthcare: the role of apps and closer connections with patients
The Apple Watch and health marketing It may sound incongruous when you imagine the common uses for Apple’s latest invention. However, as with all mobile devices, it is the perfect device for capturing patient attention as consumers use smartphones and tablets to quickly find information. You may have heard skeptics say that wearable devices will remain relegated to monitoring our heart rate or blood pressure while doing cardio. Nobody said it should stop there, and the potential of wearable devices in healthcare marketing is an open book, even for plastic surgeons.
Everything is already in place on the Apple Watch to convincingly market your plastic surgery practice to new or existing patients. At the same time, it also has a new device to facilitate communication with new or current patients to help provide what they normally look for in cosmetic surgery.
What elements of the Apple Watch could help you better connect with your potential or future patients? As many tools as there are, you still need to think about screen width and how well viewers see your marketing content.
The role of apps on the Apple Watch
Using apps on the Apple Watch is as common an activity as it is on smartphones. While you have a smaller screen on the Apple Watch, many people keep track of their health in specialized apps. However, how many apps have you seen on the device that provide insider information on different conditions?
The potential here for medical practices creating apps that track or provide educational information is very revealing. Creating an app for your own plastic surgery practice has the same kind of potential to provide information and reveal what patients want.
In this case, you could create a tracker that tracks what people prefer when it comes to plastic surgery procedures. By amassing this information, you have a real-time way of determining what types of procedures are most popular and what kind of results patients demand.
You must also provide information on your application about each procedure and what it involves. As with all apps, the easier you make it to use, the better. This could happen through an easy search box that allows people to find what they want done (in layman’s terms) leading them to a video or a quick rundown on what’s involved.
Better connectivity with patients
The Apple Watch already has a tool called HealthKit (it also integrates with Apple’s ResearchKit) that allows you to share information about health apps with your local health provider. While most of these features are for people with chronic conditions, don’t rule out other possibilities. It is important to stay connected with your current patients as much as you can to get updates on new plastic surgery procedures you offer or information on new techniques.
By providing an option to have a patient’s health information automatically sent to you from an app, it helps you better serve your patients. Consider this a new way of creating customer personas where you collect existing data to form the perfect picture of the patient you need to serve.
Since some health problems require plastic surgery, the app you created earlier could send you information about how a particular plastic surgery procedure would help the patient in question. As a result, your prospective patient would realize the value of HealthKit in sharing information, even if everyone needs an opt-out.
Share information for better research
USA Today recently mentioned how developers are working on apps that automatically send health information to medical organizations with the intention of improving medical research. While the above health information may help your patients right away, let them know that the information you collect also helps you in your research.
When you understand what patients need, you can work to research new techniques that would enable innovations you might not otherwise achieve without more detailed data.