Business Opportunity
athenahealth was a disruptive force in healthcare simply by moving patient records, claims, etc. to the cloud. However, they did not pursue a mobile strategy and ultimately were left behind. A May 2011 survey by Manhattan Research revealed that 75% of physicians in the United States have purchased an Apple mobile device such as an iPad, iPhone or iPod. I surveyed athenaNet users and learned that 60% of physicians reported to be using an iPhone versus 6% for droid, blackberry, or others. The opportunity to enable mobile access to the application was clear.
Designing for Delight
I partnered with another talented designer to prototype the minimum lovable product for the EHR on an iPhone.
Testing and Iteration
I built an acrylic sled so we could test our prototype on iPod Touches at an user conference. We were able to run 50 sessions with physicians in attendance, which was more than enough to validate the hypothesis of value we could delivery by building the product.
Delight Delivered
The athenaClinicals iPhone application entered Beta on Saturday April 14, 2012. As expected, it resonated with physicians, one physician commented, “this is a pretty beefy app, I didn't expect it to be quite so beefy.” Another one said, “Intuitive! Better than if you copied athenNet exactly onto the iPhone app.”
Within 2 weeks, with no marketing, 440 physicians used the app to complete 1,000+ inbox tasks and sent over 400+ prescriptions.