Imagine going home from the hospital just 3 days early after having major, open-heart surgery. That's becoming a reality, aided by new digital health apps that are connecting doctors and patients like never before and redefining what it means to deliver a superior Patient Experience.
Expect long lines at Apple Stores today for the long-awaited Apple Watch. This year alone UBS expects Apple to sell 25 million of them, with annual shipments reaching 68 million by 2018. Apple has a tendency to swoop in and dominate markets, as it did with smartphones, tablets, and personal audio, so it's not a big stretch to expect the company to accomplish the same thing with wearables. If so, it could open up a major new digital marketing channel uniquely suited to wearable tech.
In the early March demo event, Apple VP of technology Kevin Lynch used his Apple Watch to take a call, watch a video, and open a garage door among other things. And like other smartwatches, it can do things like track your heart rate and tell you when you've been sitting around for too long. An accelerometer measures total body movement, calories burned, and number of steps per day, and there's potential for countless health related applications, which is great news for healthcare digital marketers. Here are 3 reasons why the Apple Watch will be the new marketing frontier in healthcare.
Hospital website redesigns aren’t easy.
First of all, there’s the internal politics. They seem to put the needs of individuals and department agendas over the needs of the entire organization. This complication seems to affect hospital website redesigns more than any other industry.
I’ve been describing what I call the “mobile imperative” for a few years now. The mobile user experience is not an add-on. We need to deliver websites that will hold up for a few years’ time, that should work on today’s devices and those we haven’t yet seen.
On your way home from work, you stop at the store to pick up some more milk. As you’re walking back to your car, reflexively your iPhone appears in your hand and you swipe through a pile of emails. A clever subject line catches your attention. But what’s this? Who could possibly read this mouse type email content?! You fumble the milk as you try to pinch the screen, almost walking into another car leaving the parking lot. Forget this! You’re at your car and delete the message before you ever had a chance to see what it said.
Just north of Silicon Valley and just south of Napa, Fruition Sciences is using real-time sensors to monitor the hydration levels of grape vines. Farmers in dryer climates like California are quickly adopting this technology to create perfectly hydrated grapes and save thousands of gallons of water per year.
